In the year of Sputnik (1957) I was born into a lower working class family in the small New England town of Middleboro, Massachusetts. Upon graduating from Middleboro High School in 1975, I began my college education at nearby Bridgewater State College. I had started out with plans to be a music major, but on the first day of class my Freshman Composition professor handed out a flier on why you should consider being an English major.
English major? I had never heard of such a thing. “You mean to tell me,” I asked myself, “that I can write and read and talk about books for a living? I already do that for fun!” So I immediately set my sights on becoming an English professor myself rather than the next hero folk singer musician.
I dove deep into an academic life that I had never imagined before. After several independent studies in the works of James Joyce and a year of study abroad in London, I graduated in 1980. I was next on to graduate school as an English major at the University of New Mexico, where I earned my Master’s degree in 1982 and my Ph.D. in 1987.
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During the time of my first academic job as a high school teacher at Sandia Preparatory School, a private school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was lucky enough to get a book contract with Indiana University Press, who published my doctoral dissertation as Textual Politics and the Language Poets in 1989.
After teaching for several years as an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University, I took some time teaching eighth grade and high school English at Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, a private school in the Kansas City area before settling in Athens, Ohio in 1999 into my career as a professor of English at Ohio University.
I received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2002 and then—after publishing dozens of essays and a second book, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime, with Duke University Press (2003)—promotion to full Professor in 2018.
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This very productive teaching and writing time for me was punctuated—one might even say punctured—by a series of personal tragedies that changed my life, including the deaths of two of my sons, only to be followed by a stroke in the summer of 2017. I realized after trying to return to teaching in the Spring Semester of 2019 that I had not yet healed enough from my stroke to continue teaching at that time. So I took early retirement from my career as an English Professor and, with my son and wife (a native of Kirkkonummi, Finland), moved to Fiskars, Finland.
During the past five years of further rehabilation I spent my time getting to know the forests and coastline of southern Finland, homeschooling our son, and completing a book manuscript that I had begun putting together before my stroke in 2017. In January 2024 I received a contract to publish that book, Open Veins of the Continental Divides: Meditations on Indigeneity, Chicanismo, and Planetary Consciousness (pending outside reader reviews) with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield publishers.
