POETRY
I received my MFA in Creative Writing (with a focus on poetry) from New York University in 2000.
I was mentored by one of my favorite poets of all time - the late, great poet laureate: Philip Levine. I miss him tremendously and I can hear his voice and picture his wry smile. I imagine he’d give me a nice “ya did good, kid” if he found out I finally got around to writing that novel.
At NYU, I was privileged to spend time with E.L. Doctorow (even was at a party with Kurt Vonnegut once!), and spent many writing workshop hours sweating it out with my peers. In the presence of Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Jean Valentine, Sharon Olds, Eamon Grennan, and Agha Shahid Ali — we were all humbled and learned at the feet of these esteemed masters.
(I wouldn’t be a writer without my other beloved teachers: Deborah Digges, Peter Richards, Judith Kocela Hawke, Julie Sheinman, Elaine Bougdanos - and many others.)
The joke (?) I’ve heard many times: novelists make lousy poets, but poets make great novelists.
I’m hoping I did OK as both.
MORE POETRY TO BE POSTED SOON!
(I’ll post some of my other published poetry, once I can dig around my old files and get organized.)
“Folding Won Tons In” was published in a few places, here’s the page from Columbia University’s AJ JOURNAL (Spring 1999). It was also published in a Holt Literature and Language Arts textbook - long out of print, but probably still circulating in schools. If you Google my name and “poet” - you’ll likely find several English class presentations floating around the web.
“A Nameless Imitation of the Morlocks” was one of the poems in a small collection that I submitted that won me an Academy of American Poets Prize in 1997, while I was an undergrad at Tufts University. From the start, I’ve been referencing pop culture (in this case Jules Verne AND the Uncanny X-Men) as well as my experience as a born and bred New Yorker.