I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After receiving a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame in 1961, I sailed to Europe on a British freighter and traveled extensively throughout the Continent. Returning to the States, I taught English in high schools in Connecticut and Pennsylvania before completing a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 1968.

My first academic appointment was at the University of Virginia, but a growing passion for poetry prompted me to resign from a tenured position after eight years and embark on an odyssey of blue collar jobs that included working inn a tobacco factory in Richmond, on a horse farm in northern Virginia, and on a city bus in Washington, D.C., which I drove for four years.

In 1985 my wife and I moved to Fresno, California, where I returned to teaching as an ESL instructor. My students were Hispanic-American adults who met for evening classes in churches after working all day in the fields. In 1992 I completed an M.A. in Creative Writing at CSU, Fresno, under the direction of Philip Levine. For the past ten years I have been an adjunct instructor at Fresno Pacific University.

My poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Seneca Review, Green Mountains Review, California Quarterly, Poet Lore and Tar River Poetry. A critical essay on the poetry of Li-Young Lee appeared in Asian America: Journal of Culture and the Arts, and a new edition of my translation of the Venezuelan poet Jesús Serra's book, Páramos en la Memoria, is scheduled for publication this year by the University of the Andes Press.

My wife is a professor at California State University, Fresno, and my daughter is a graduate of CSU, Humbolt.