I attended Kenyon College (A.B.) and The City College of New York (M.A.). My doctoral dissertation at NYU was on the lives and poetry of Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. I use diverse forms and content to reflect my lifelong fascination with the varieties of spoken English--portraiture, narrative, brief lyric, prose poem, confession, elegy, found poems, dramatic monologue, scatter lines, documentary and imagistic vignette. At times, the poem that emerges from this celebration of sound and diction is an exercise in form, or an experiment in wordplay, or a simple, discursive narrative. Poems may "channel" the dialects of relatives and neighbors from inner city Baltimore; Bedford Stuyvesant; West Cape May, New Jersey; and folks in South Carolina's Low Country. My poetic alter ego, Herald, accommodates rural African Americans' wisdom, concerns, and humor.