Writing and reading poetry helps me appreciate our natural world, better understand our social world, and accept the constancy of change in both. Good undergraduate teachers incited my interest in language, which influenced my career choice, and poetry became a passion over years of teaching literature and creative writing to college students. Hiking and camping as a teenager led to a lifelong love of outdoor photography and landscape painting, two direct impacts on my writing. 

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My newest collection, a poetic biography of Albert Bierstadt, the celebrated 19th-century American landscape painter, The Best Material for the Artist in the World  (Stephen F. Austin State  University Press, 2023), won the Wrangler Award for Outstanding Poetry Book from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022), is a selected poems volume featuring many new poems and the best from two contest-winning chapbooks, Logic of the Lost (Longleaf Press) and Absolute Faith (ByLine Press). I have served as a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and teach workshops for the Great Smokies Writing Program through the University of North Carolina--Asheville.

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