"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
- E.L. Doctorow

I am a member of Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Workshop. "Art," says Maxine Hong Kingston, "is the transformation of feelings and experience into meaning. Writing is a tool for accessing events and memories and giving them meaning ...we have lived with war experiences in our hearts. Now we can put them through the process of art. Now is the time for the healing and the coming home."

Maxine Hong Kingston and the other veterans of our workshop gave me the strength to stop running and begin healing. I found other veterans and people who understood the horrible tragedy and grief that war causes. I know now, as many veterans have learned, that I will never be fully whole until I revisit Iraq and make peace with the people I once falsely believed were my enemies. I long for that day.

Much of my writing is evidence of my distrust and disbelief in war as an option, as well as expressions of my personal experiences during and after the Gulf War.

I was formerly the Poetry Editor and Managing Editor for Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. I am a two-time winner of the Mark Linenthal Poetry Award and a Finalist in the Ann Fields Poetry Prize.

My poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in EM, Big Ugly Review, First Intensity, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, LUNA, Sentence, Transfer, Paragraph, Parthenon West, Potpourri, Sleeping Fish, Small Town, and Mobius magazines. My work is anthologized in the limited edition My America and in Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, by Koa Books. My first book, Manufacturer's Specifications and Guidelines, is forthcoming from Blue Barnhouse Publishing..

Check out the 2011 UND Writer's Conference Interview by Prairie Public Radio