Welcome friends.
Since my seizure in 2014 and subsequent glioblastoma diagnosis, I have been leading a changed life. It is because of this that I am often drawn in my poetry to the language of renewal, second lives and afterlives. In my poetry I live again in those moments and in those times that most define for me what it means to be alive.
It is for this reason that one night, awake and wracked with steroidal joint pain, hobbling from chair back to countertop, and with only a median life expectancy of 14.6 months, I decided to apply to be admitted into the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Three years later, I graduated with my Master of Fine Arts degree.
Heading into my final semester at UMKC, I came out with my first collection of poems, Fall Risk, from Glass Lyre Press, in Glenview, Illinois.