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I was born in Minneapolis, Minn., six months before
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

But my first childhood memories are of Guam island,
where my father took a teaching job after receiving his
Ph.D. It was a childhood of rocky beaches, skittering
lizards and huge black-and-yellow spiders with webs that covered walls.

My parents moved to a suburb outside Chicago, then to a small mining town
in the Appalachian Mountains, where for good and for ill I spend most of my
formative years. I didn't fit in there, had little love for the strip mines or the
native sons who bullied me, but I did spend many wonderful hours in a
well-stocked library on a hill across town. My father, yes, made me read The
Lord of the Rings, his favorite book, and hiking down the paths that started
there led me to H.P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and T.S.
Eliot, Roger Zelazny and Stephen King. For years I had a subscription to
Asimov's Science Fiction, which functioned as my window into the "glamorous"
world of speculative fiction.

My family finally moved to Roanoke, Va., where I still live. In 1992, the year
that Pope John Paul II forgave Galileo, I graduated from college, married
Anita (nee Seth) and sold my first short story to a small press zine. Three
years later, after landing my master's degree, I made my first blip on the
publishing radar by editing and printing New Dominions, a chapbook of
stories and poems by Virginia writers such as Nelson S. Bond and R.H.W.
Dillard (the title was a play on "The Old Dominion.")

Anita and I now live in a house we call "Stone Oak Croft" among too-tall trees
beneath a pestilence of squirrels. We are tolerated by our cat (Bella)Donna,
the real owner of the house — though she tolerates our goofy gallumphing
dog Loki considerably less, and though he's five times her size, he lives in
fear of her.

In my day job I'm a newspaper reporter, but this website is all about what I do
in my spare time: for nine years I've been editor, and am now publisher, of
the biannual poetry journal Mythic Delirium. I've also edited or co-edited
several books, including The Alchemy of Stars (the anthology of all the
poems which have won the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling
Award) and the MYTHIC anthologies of fantasy poetry and fiction. I've
published four books of poetry, and my latest, Strange Wisdoms of the
Dead, was a Philadelphia Inquirer Editor's Choice selection. I'm a former
president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and a two-time winner
of the Rhysling Award. I also manage to spit out an occasional short story or
article, often in collaboration with others. I get a kick out of collaborating and
do it with an addict's frequency.

I'm mostly known for poetry where I'm known at all (I've had over 150 of them
published, in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, Nebula
Awards Showcase, Santa Clara Review , Strange Horizons, and other places).
Lately I've re-engaged a youthful fascination with the stage, and I can
frequently be spotted late Friday nights performing in Roanoke
Underground's No Shame Theatre, often finding ways to convert my strange
poems into stranger stage skits. A couple of these I've reprised at the
Rhysling Awards Poetry Slan Reading at ReaderCon in Boston, which I've
hosted for the past two years.