EarlierI spent my youth moving about small towns and rural communities in Southwest Virginia and Northwest North Carolina. My post-secondary education was at Brigham Young University and Duke University.
LaterI served in France as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and, briefly, as a consultant in Taiwan, as a teacher in Belize, and as an adjunct professor at Southern Virginia University. In 2014 I retired from a thirty-year career with an NC insurance company to become a writer, editor, and occasional publisher.
NowMy poetry has won several prizes from the North Carolina Poetry Society, including the Lena Shull Prize in 2015 for the full-length book, Mouth Work, published by St. Andrews University Press. In 2018, “The Creator Praises Birds” won the Clint Larson Poetry Award from BYU Studies Quarterly, and in 2022 "His Own Hand" won the "Body/Bodies of Christ" contest conducted by Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. In 2023, two poems--"The Pear" and "Earthworm Lore"--were among the 12 finalists in the Mormon Lit Blitz competition for micro-literature in all genres. My work has also been nominated four times for the Pushcart Poetry Prize.
I'm currently writing a memoir of my father, posting sections here as I complete the rough draft. His traumatic death in 1977 still haunts me; I'm trying to understand it in as full a context as I can discover. Go to the Works in Progress tab to begin reading. I live in Raleigh with my wife, Patti. |