ABOUT
ABOUT

Chancellor Florida State Poets Association
Florida Poet Laureate Volusia County
Winner of 2011 American Poet Prize
Award Winning Poetry
Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize
1-800-THE-LOST
The weight of the receiver in my hand:
the down bird in my palm first lifting you.
The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland...
2011 American Poetry Journal
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020
Best of the Net Nominee 2021
Smiling at the Executioner
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
As if the open barrel were a lotus;
its roots anchored in mud.
How undeterred...
2020 Sky Island Journal
Winner of the Folio Editor's Prize
Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode, let your sorrows go.
Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves,
let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age.
2019 Folio
Winner of the Annie Finch Prize
On Recognizing Saints
As if to find new icons for her life
or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine
she scans our purchases too consciously...
2005 National Poetry Review
Winner of the New South Writing Contest
Amber Alert
A white Ford, black gate, Georgia plate,
squeezes into our lane. In the back, a Whitetail –
tagged and slashed from her chest to hind legs...
2013 new south: Georgia St. Univ. Journal
Robert Frost Award
Sugaring
Sestina for an ill boy
A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered.
Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm
partly boy, partly tree. For comity we call it Mr. Pipes...
2016 Naugatuck River Review
Featured in Verse Daily
Against Elegies
What if we let you sing first?
What if we look for you with Mallarme’s
blank stare: birds round an empty dish...
2004 National Poetry Review
Winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize
The Rape of Chryssipus
She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly's bones came home to us."
― Mother of 16-year old Molly Bish, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000.
For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered.
The gods saw what he took -- a young boy's chance
to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings...
2007 Spoon River Poetry Review
Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry
Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children
Before we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound.
If one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you
sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened...
2012 The Adirondack Review
Winner of the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award
Sanriku
The game was not to look - but feel -
the slow drag, the distant rise
and fall, the quiet revolt of crests...
2006 Willow Springs
Muriel Craft Bailey Award - Finalist
Odalisque
Early light, the chill of souls leaving. You draw up the sheet
to cover us; the soft of musk, the body's heat
from an air pocket, nudged and wayward. The scent...
2006 Comstock Review
Winner of the Emerson College Original Poetry Award
On Rewinding
I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep-
wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth.
I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the...
1974 Emerson College Review
Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up
The Arrangement
Because we were getting old enough
our instructor took us to look at (not to touch)
some pictures grown men drew...
2012 Beauty/Truth: Ekphrastic Poetry
Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist
Catharsis
A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts
since his doctor recommended more fruit. My head
tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke...
2012 Smartish Pace
Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist
Bad Apology
As if in an endless rehearsal,
I packed and unpacked. The challenge,
you said, was to take no more...
2017 SWWIM
Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist
At the Grieving Parents Meeting
In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church,
pictures of murdered children in our hands,
we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs...
2012 River Styx