I have loved poetry as long as I can remember, published my first poem at the age of nine, and thought of myself as a poet from then on. I began to learn the craft of poetry seriously as an undergraduate at Yale in the late 70s, and published (and performed, with several musicians, costumes, and bagpipes) my first chapbook, The Encyclopedia of Scotland in 1982. I went on to earn an MA in creative writing at the University of Houston and in 1990 I completed a Ph.D in English at Stanford. My dissertation, which set forth a new theory about the significance of traditional meter in free verse, was later published as The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. (U. of Michigan Press, 1993), It will be reissued in paperback in the spring of 2000.

Eve, my first collection of poems, was published by Story Line Press in 1997. It includes the best of hundreds of poems written over a twenty-year period in a great variety of verse forms from free verse to hendecasyllabics. Eve was selected as a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the National Poetry Series, and nominated for the Great Lakes Writers Award. A selection of the poems was published as Catching the Mermother in a fine letter-press edition by Aralia Press that same year. I have since completed two more volumes of poetry: a book- length narrative poem, Marie Moving, forthcoming from Story Line Press in 2001; and a translation of the Complete Poems of French Renaissance poet Louise Labe, currently in circulation.

In order to broaden the diversity of contemporary formalism and to provide a critical space for the reception of my own work, I edited A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line, 1994), which is now in its fourth printing. Another anthology I edited, After New Formalism (Story Line, 1999), collects diverse theoretical essays on contemporary formalism. An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (U. of Michigan Press, coedited with Kathrine Varnes, forthcoming in Spring 2000), collects writings on specific poetic forms from a great range of poets as varied as Amiri Baraka, John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, and Charles Bernstein in order to challenges the "formal/free" dichotomy by positioning formal poetics in a continuum reaching from rap to Language poetry.

I have been invited to be a featured poet at many literary festivals and reading series including the Des Moines Poety Festival, the Elliston Poetry Series, Notre Dame's Sophomore Literary Festival, and the Poetry Center of Chicago. Recently, my poetry has attracted the attention of several music composers including Bruce Rockwell and Stefania de Kennessey, and my libretto "A Captive Spirit," based on the life and career of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, will premiere in Fall 2000 at Da Capo Opera Company in New York, with music by New York City Opera composer-in-residence Deborah Drattell.