How did you get started writing poetry? In the early 1980s, not long after I began employment at Nebraska Wesleyan University as a horticulturist, I enrolled in a poetry-writing class taught by the late great Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn. I had never written a poem before, but I’d read Kloefkorn...

How did your interest in poetry begin? I came to poetry late. I was studying to be a fiction specialist. In fact, my dissertation was on Faulkner’s novels. But while studying modern poetry in preparation for my doctoral orals, I came across a Howard Nemerov poem titled “Mousemeal.” I was so...

Your latest novel In Our Other Lives was released on March 3, 2020. What do you want potential readers to know about the book? The story is told from the perspective of an NSA/FBI investigation into a Midwestern family whose son has disappeared while working as a missionary in Pakistan and then reemerges...

How did your latest work In a Good Time come about? Could you talk a little bit about the title? Various pathways led to In a Good Time. While the final push to publication came quickly (the book was published in September 2019), the book took about four or five years to complete. The poems were finished...