I try to stay open to influence, and my influences are many: Robinson Jeffers, Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Donald Justice, James Merrill, Dana Gioia, Anne Stevenson, Robert Hass, Nora May French, Clark Ashton Smith, and Marie Ponsot are just a very few who have impressed me (and left a mark). I've studied with Dennis Schmitz, Harold Schneider, and Kathryn Hohlwein, among others. I'm a musician (trumpet), and music comes into my poetry, as with the English composer-poet Arnold Bax. Yet I hope my work is a good record of what the average Californian, average American might think if moved to write on the day's events public and private. Married to Nora Laila Staklis, artist and author of a poetry chapbook, The River Speaks.

Education: Bachelor's degree in music performance, Sacramento State University (1977). Master's degree in music performance, San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1979).