Thanks for dropping by. I’m a poet and writer who’s rattled by our apparent disregard for the “fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” That’s Aldo Leopold’s definition of land, as laid out in his clarion call to cease considering human beings to be the only living things on earth that matter: A Sand County Almanac. I was the child who headed to the lake or into the woods with a bag of books and notebooks. For me, however beleaguered they may be, land and the water that turns land into watersheds remain inexhaustible sources of resilience.

But I’m also the adult who’s happy to visit—online—the drawings of a young Irish artist whose work I discovered at one of my favorite bookstores, or to click through to a friend’s newly published poem. That sort of immediate access to another kind of inspiration can be breathtaking for those of us who grew up without computers.

Reading and writing, especially the creative kind, liberate our imaginations from what-is and nudge us—or shove us—toward what-could-be. In these times, imagination, so long as it is coupled with a land ethic, seems more important than ever.

I’m based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but seem to live all across the southern Lower Peninsula these days, a dispersion that is probably unsustainable.

Click here for recent news and upcoming events, here for more about me, here for interviews, here for my blog, and here to listen to a reading I gave when Before the Snow Moon was published.