I grew up in northern New Jersey: Irish Catholic family, parochial schools, nuns who taught us to diagram sentences. In the early seventies I studied Folklore & Oral History at the University of Maine, Orono, then went on to graduate work in Cultural Anthropology at Syracuse University. I dropped out after receiving my M.A. and passing my Ph.D. exams (but before fieldwork and dissertation) to move to a "rustic" cabin in the Berkshires and work with schizophrenic adolescent boys at a residential institution. For the next 20 years or so I held a variety of low-paying jobs: Ithaca Journal delivery person, frat cook, part-time photographer... and finally returned to school in 1990 to pursue my Ph.D. in English/Writing, which is what I had really wanted to do all along (it takes some people awhile to figure things out). I now live in an old farmhouse in the country with my partner whose two grown children often come around to visit. We have a lovely golden retriever who expresses her pleasure at our return home by grabbing one of our shoes and parading it around until we offer a biscuit in exchange. I've been teaching at IC since 1996.

Areas

• personal narrative
• poetry
• poetics
• first-year academic writing
• queer studies

Degrees

• Ph.D. English (poetry), Binghamton University, 1996
• M.A. English (poetry), SUNY Binghamton, 1992 
• M.A. Anthropology, Syracuse University, 1979
• B.A. Anthropology, University of Maine, 1975

Some Publications 

• Forthcoming: "You Scared Me," River Lit, 12/3/12
• Forthcoming: "Rigged and Ready," River Lit 11/26/12
• Forthcoming: "In Abruzzo," River Lit, 11/12/12
• "Elegy" (poem), The Healing Muse, Vol. 12 No. 1, 2012
• "Foreigners," and "Cures for Insomnia," Literary Bohemian, Issue 16, 2012
• “These East Coast Tourists” (poem), Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 85, 2012
• "Age, Body, Repetition," River Lit, 9/24/12
• "My Early Seventies," Inkwell, Issue 10, 2012
• "Rite," "Professor X Circles the Drain," and "Preston" (shorts) Red Fez
• “Gravity” and “When we aren’t looking” (poems), Printer’s Devil Review, Spring, 2011
• “I’ll Have the Fish” (short story), Asinine Poetry, May, 2011
• "Inheritance," The Cafe Irreal, August, 2010, and Fiction Daily, September, 2010
• "Sociology," Mad Hatters' Review, 2010.
• "Think of E. B. White," The Comstock Review, 2009.
• "Harmony Falls," Prick of the Spindle. Vol 3.3, Fall 2009.
• "Freud's Dream," Blue Earth Review, 2007.
• "Waiting for the Alligators," In the Eye, Thunder Rain Publishing, 2007.
• Smackdown! Winner of the 2006 Teachers' Voice Chapbook Competition.
• "The Story of My Travels," Massachusetts Review. Summer 2001, Vol. XLII, No. 2
• Book Review: Ordinary Words, by Ruth Stone. Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. Vol. XXVII, 2000-2001.
• "Memoir:  Ruth Stone," Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. Vol. XXVII, 2000-2001.
• "Pantoum," Massachusetts Review. Winter, Vol. XLI, No. 4, 2000-2001.