About me
I lead workshops in poetry and memoir writing at community and adult education venues in the Boston area (including Boston Center for Adult Education and Lexington Community Education) and at my house in Cambridge. I am also a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry.I am a poet and playwright. My poems have been published in many journals, including Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Crazyhorse, Witness, Massachusetts Review, and Poetry Ireland Review and have been anthologized in Hacks: Ten Years of Grub Street and the Poets for Haiti anthology. I am a recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry. FutureCycle Press (Lexington, KY) will publish my collection of poems, House You Cannot Reach, in 2015.Writers interested in improving their craft in a supportive and collegial environment are welcome in my workshops. I conduct a workshop at my house that is designed for poets working at an advanced level, including poets who are considering applying to an MFA program or MFA graduates who would like to continue the discipline of a workshop. Writers who have studied with me have won the Cave Canem Prize, the New American Poetry Prize, the First Book Award from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, the Academy of American Poets Prize (UMass Boston), the Dana Foundation prize for poetry about the brain, and the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, among other honors. Participants in my workshops have gone on to study at Masters of Fine Arts programs in writing at Brown University, Columbia University, The New School, University of Massachusetts at Boston, Syracuse University, St. Mary's College, Columbia College, SUNY Albany, Vermont Union, and Lesley University. Workshop participants have served as editors at Salt Hill, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Amethyst Arsenic, and Birds LLC press. Here is a testimonial from a participant in a recent workshop I led: “The workshop has gotten me back on track with writing poetry and given me new confidence. Your [optional] assignments have been so interesting and provocative that they've put me back in the zone where I don't question the value of writing, but just relish doing it and long for more time to do it. The background material and examples are incredibly useful and helped to tune up my ear. I was moved by getting [poems picked out for each participant from established writers] each time. That you would put in this effort made me feel worthy, and sent me reading those poems to look for connections to my own writing. That was a real gift from you. Your own critiques are thoughtful and often bring up points that others don't see or raise. You focus a lot on the language. It's by far the best workshop I've had. I appreciate the great effort you put into it.”
