My first poems were about national park wonders seen on a six-week western camping trip when I was in college.  From there, a merging interest in poetry, photography, and landscape painting became my path. Good undergraduate teachers incited my interest in language, which influenced my career choice, and poetry became a passion over forty-years of teaching creative writing and literature at the college level. Writing and reading poetry helps me appreciate our natural world, better understand our social world, and accept the constancy of change in both. 
The Best Material for the Artist in the World is my poetic biography of Albert Bierstadt, the celebrated 19th-century American landscape painter (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023).   If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022) is a selected poems volume featuring new poems and the best from two contest-winning chapbooks, Logic of the Lost (Longleaf Press) and Absolute Faith (ByLine Press). I served two years as a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society and teach workshops for the Great Smokies Writing Program of the University of North Carolina—Asheville.

M.A.  Colorado State University
Ph.D. University of North Carolina--Greensboro