When it comes to writing, I'm reminded of the slogan seen on t-shirts in gay bookstores--"I can't even think straight"--since my writing career has been so circuitous. Though I once taught English at the university level, I am not an academic, having foregone the university life for the challenges of secondary education. Though I've been writing most of my life, all of my published poems have been in the past three decades. I frequently remind my high school students that the difference between success and failure comes down to one word: persistence. I am, if nothing else, persistent in my writing.    

2003--I won the Taos Writers' Conference Merit Scholarship in Poetry. 2010--I won the Christina Sergeyevna Award for the best poem at the Austin International Poetry Festival. I was judged a winner in the 2015 Great River Shakespeare Festival/Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest for my entry "Birding in Fog" in the Contest category, Laureate's Choice. "Leaf and Beak" was a Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters' Helen C. Smith Memorial Award in 2016.

I edited the Dos Gatos Press collection, "Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry," an anthology of exercises by 58 poets from around the country, as well as its follow-up, "Wingbeats II" (2014). I also edited the anthology "Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga" and the brand-new "Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems."