Born in Baltimore, I attended public schools there and worked five years as a part-time baggage clerk at the Greyhound Bus Terminal while I earned a BA in English at the University of Maryland and an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. I met my wife Judith Ayers at Johns Hopkins. After graduation we moved to New York where I worked as an Editing Supervisor for the McGraw-Hill Book Company for two years in College Textbooks and the International Division. Subsequently, I earned an MFA from the Program in Creative Writing (the Writers Workshops) at the University of Iowa. My books of poetry are A PLANET (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), TWENTIETH CENTURY WOMEN (University of Georgia Press, 1988), which was selected by John Ashbery for the Contemporary Poetry Series, CITIES AND TOWNS (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), which received the Juniper Prize, LEFT WING OF A BIRD (Sarabande, 2003), EXPEDITION: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011), and ORBIT (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016), with numerous appearances in anthologies such as THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY (Scribner), THE PUSHCART PRIZE, THE NEW BREADLOAF ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY, and AMERICAN HYBRID (W.W. Norton & Co.). I was co-editor of the Norton anthology THE BODY ELECTRIC, THE BEST POETRY FROM THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW. I've been employed variously as a teacher (University of Redlands, University of Southern California, University of Nevada, Wichita State University, the Kansas Arts Commission, University of Iowa), and as an editor (THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, 1973 - 2006). The recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry, I live in Los Angeles with my wife Judith.