• Curates the Myopic Books Poetry Series in Chicago. • Co-director of The Chicago School of Poetics.
• Edits the journal milkmag.org, which has featured poets such as Robert Creeley, Ron Padgett, Cid Corman, Frank Lima, Janine Pommy Vega, Clayton Eshleman, Sheila E. Murphy, and Jerome Rothenberg.
• Edited Nexus magazine (Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio).
• A recent chapbook, Tyrannosaurus Ant, was included in the Yale Collection of American Literature.
• Named Best Poet by The Chicago Reader in its 2012 & 2013 annual Best of Chicago readers' poll.
• Of Unable to Fully California, his first collection, David Shapiro writes: "I fell in love with your 'blue fruit' and 'inescapable tomorrow,' also what seems like renunciation not of sentimentality but of cliché …I like even the quasi-Romantic dislocations here: 'There is a beauty to ice / only a statue understands.' I’m not a statue, so I only partially understand, but that should be more than enough for Sawyer's uncanny picnic on no grass … seemed as real as the Bronx, and I couldn’t stop thinking: I am so lucky that this poetry is so good."