I grew up in Southeast Arkansas, the second child of an industrial salesman and a registered Nurse.

I won a fiction award at the University of Arkansas and survived its Master of Fine Arts poetry writing workshop as an undergraduate. Rather than become a poet, I developed the somewhat more practical ambition of becoming a professor of literature, which would allow me to inflict other people’s poetry on unwilling sophomores. After a fellowship at the University of Missouri and two years of active duty in the Army Surgeon General’s office writing speeches and news releases and dealing with the media, I returned to graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in the literature of the English Renaissance (University of Texas-Austin). My academic success was rewarded with… a twenty-one year army career. Probably a better outcome than expected.

The Army gave me many and varied jobs. In addition to a couple of human resources and administrative positions, I recruited doctors and other medical professionals in the upper Midwest, renovated a former Wehrmacht hospital in Bad Canstatt, Federal Republic of Germany, ran the Army medical department’s writing program, was a professor in the Army-Baylor University graduate health care administration program, and directed medical recruiting for nineteen western states. I have lived throughout the U.S. and in Germany.

After the army, I settled in Northwest Arkansas. I traveled the country training business writers. Later I served as a part-time, adjunct professor at the local community college. My day job was as a financial adviser.

I’ve been published in academic journals, the statewide newspaper, and my monthly column (2010-2013) in the Morning News of Northwest Arkansas (circulation 50,000).