I’ve been writing poetry most of my life. It isn’t my job, but it’s been a constant. I was born and raised in rural Nevada, in a place shaped by above-ground nuclear testing, hard agricultural labor, and family systems that didn’t work very well, including my own. That landscape, physical and social, is still the ground my work comes out of, even though I’ve lived elsewhere for many years.

I have my M.F.A. in Poetry from California State University-Fresno. My most direct influences are Corrinne Clegg Hales, Kobayashi Issa, Philip Levine, James Galvin, Richard Hugo, and Jack Gilbert, among many others.

For a living, I teach things that have nothing to do with poetry.

Poetry From the Working Class

People like to say art comes from suffering. I won’t generalize, but most of my poems come out of hard experience. I’ve never been interested in poetry that floats above everyday life or tries to escape it. I’m more interested in work that stays close to how people actually live.

The people I grew up around worked with their bodies. They didn’t have much money or protection. When you come from a working-class family, very little is guaranteed, not your health, not your safety, not even your own body. Long hours, dangerous work, isolation, and poverty leave marks. Those marks show up in my poems.

A lot of contemporary literature comes from places I didn’t have access to. I don’t begrudge that, but it isn’t where I come from. I’m interested in writing about ordinary people whose lives don’t usually make it into books.

Telling a Story

I care about clarity. I care about story. Even with two degrees in poetry, I often read literary magazines and feel lost. That may be my background talking, but I don’t believe poetry needs to be unreadable to be serious.

Most poets who write about working-class life lean toward narrative, and so do I. Story is how people pass knowledge, history, and survival down. You don’t need special training to understand it.

I’m the only person in my family to become a college professor or a published poet, and probably the only one from my hometown. I didn’t expect to end up here, and I doubt anyone else did either.

If you want to know more about my work, the best place to start is the poems themselves, many of which are available online for free. If you’re feeling generous, you can also order my chapbook and see where all this led.