“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."
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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.