Poet, fiction writer, translator, critic, artist, professor of English at Northwestern University, and from 1981 to 1997, the editor of TriQuarterly magazine, an international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern. Also co-founder and an editor of TriQuarterly Books, an imprint for contemporary writing at Northwestern University Press.
          Author of six volumes of poems: Roofs Voices Roads (published in the first volume of the Quarterly Review of Literature poetry series, 1979), The Ruined Motel (winner of the New Poetry Series competition; Houghton Mifflin, 1981), Saints (winner of the National Poetry Series competition; Persea Books, 1986), Maybe It Was So (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997), and Homage to Longshot O'Leary (Holy Cow! Press, 1999). Also author of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches (Broken Moon Press, 1991) and a novel, Sweetbitter (Broken Moon Press, 1994 and Penguin Books, 1996); and editor of The Poets' Work (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), New Writing from Mexico (TriQuarterly Books, 1992), Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem (with Terrence Des Pres; Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), Criticism in the University (with Gerald Graff; Northwestern University Press, 1985), and other books; critic (including William Goyen: A Study of the Short Fiction), translator (two volumes of translation of twentieth-century Spanish poetry by Luis Cernuda and Jorge Guillén, plus a forthcoming translation of Euripides' The Bakkhai [Oxford Univ. Press]) and textual editor (works of William Goyen).
          Awarded poetry fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. For Sweetbitter, 1995 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and 1995 Jesse Jones fiction award (Texas Institute of Letters). Also: short story award from the Texas Institute of Letters, Carl Sandburg Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library (1992), John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, Balcones Poetry Prize (1998), inclusion in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize, and others.
          Poetry, fiction, translations, essays, reviews and drawings published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, Hudson Review, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, Tikkun, American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Shenandoah, Poetry East, Sewanee Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, Critical Inquiry, Iowa Review, Ontario Review, American Voice, Southwest Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, Crazy Horse, Chicago Tribune Magazine, and others. Works reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, The New Republic, Poetry, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Choice, The Nation, Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Bloomsbury Review, and elsewhere.
          Born in Texas. Educated there in public schools and then at Princeton (AB in Spanish, 1969) and Stanford (MA in English and Creative Writing, 1971; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1974). Before editing and teaching at Northwestern, visiting appointments at Princeton, Columbia and the University of Chicago; on the core faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Readings, lectures, classes and workshops given at more than one hundred colleges, universities, research centers, public libraries, and other institutions in the U.S., England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Switzerland, and Venezuela.