
photo by Susannah Greenberg
“There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.”
–W.H. Auden
WELCOME!
I write poetry that can be enjoyed by both children and adults. My children's poems appear in such places as Highlights for Children, High Five, Highlights HELLO, Cricket, Spider, Ladybug, and The Caterpillar, as well as in anthologies edited by J. Patrick Lewis, Kenn Nesbitt, Sylvia Vardell, Brian Moses, James Carter, Janet Wong, Joshua Seigal, Roger Stevens, Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright. The details are here. In 2019, Brian Moses selected two of my poems to "highly commend" in The Caterpillar Poetry Prize competition. I've also been known to write light verse for adults and to translate rhyming and metrical poems from other languages (mostly Spanish). Also in 2019, I had one poem "highly commended" and another "commended" in the YorkMix children's poetry competition.
My adult poems and translations have appeared in The Washington Post, The Spectator, Salon, The Evansville Review, String Poet, Able Muse, Poetry East, The Paris Review Daily (online), The Alabama Literary Review, Ironwood, Miller’s Pond, Redactions, Anon, The Raintown Review, The Avatar Review, Per Contra, First Things, Light Quarterly, LightenUp Online, Snakeskin, and Bumbershoot, among other journals, as well as in the anthology, Villanelles, part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series published by Random House, Poems for a Liminal Age, an anthology in support of Médecins Sans Frontières, and in the latest edition of Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms.
I was the winner of the 2016 X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. My winning poem, a parody of Rainer Maria Rilke's famous "Archaic Torso of Apollo," is entitled "Archaic Torso of Barbie," and was published in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Volume XI, Issue 2. You can read it here. I was also a co-winner of the 2019 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for my translation of Leo Strauss's poem, "The Village of As Though."
My primary goal as a writer is to continue writing and publishing poems that can be enjoyed by both children and adults. I have completed several collections of children’s poems (as well as a couple of rhyming picture books) that are in search of a publisher.
You can read a few of my poems and translations by clicking on the menu up top. I hope you find something to enjoy. And thank you for stopping by!
New! Watch the YouTube video of my poem, Fabulous Five, from The School Magazine, right here.
