I am the author of five books of poetry, including The Dragon Box (Coal City Press), Pear Season and The Boy Who Ate Dandelions (The Mid-America Press), Promises In The Dust (BkMk Press) and Last Lambs: New and Selected Poems of Vietnam, Second Edi-tion (BkMk Press), a 2014 Eric Hoffer Legacy Award finalist. I am also a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the winner of the BKMK Missouri Poets Contest for my first book The Eye of The Ghost. My poem, “In The Morning In Missouri,” was chosen by The Kansas City Star as Missouri’s official state poem. My poems also appear in a number of reviews and anthologies.
I was born in 1944 in Kansas City, Missouri, No. 3 in a family of ten children. I left home at the age of 16 to escape my mentally ill father. I supported myself with money I squirreled away over several years from a variety of odd jobs, a half-time scholarship from Rockhurst College, as a copy boy and aspiring journalist on the editorial floor of the Kansas City Times and as a psychiatric aide at two area hospitals.
I earned a B.A. in English Literature with an ongoing inter-est in philosophy and psychology. I returned for a fifth year at
Rockhurst to apply for graduate school to research my personal hypothesis of the brain as the primary cause of mental illness. As a result of that fifth year I was drafted. Hoping to continue my academic career I joined the 69th Infantry Brigade of the Kansas National Guard and served in the race riots of 1968. Later that year my unit was nationalized and I was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam at Tay Ninh along the Cambodian Border and then ordered to write daily reports in the office of the commanding general in Cu Chi. For my service in Vietnam I was awarded a Bronze Star.
On my return to the States I found work as a special risks un-derwriter for a reinsurance company that had a department offering libel and slander insurance for the media. In 1979 at the request of a disgruntled risk manager for a large media company I founded Media/Professional Insurance (MPI), an international underwriting and claim management firm defending the First Amendment rights of the media. MPI developed The Media
Special Perils Policy covering claims arising out of the content
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of publishing and broadcasting. We were involved as the insurer representative in some of the most significant First Amendment cases of the 1980’s and ‘90’s. My media attorney partner and I sold the company in 1992 due to the arrival of the internet and the conglomeration of media companies by investment bankers who had little interest or respect for First Amendment issues.
The poems in this book have come to me from childhood, from running up and down Wall Street, the world’s complex reinsur-ance and financial markets, across this complicated country, following my wife, Kathy, an Episcopal priest, in her ministries in the Caribbean, Colorado and Hawaii and the injustices I have ex-perienced in my own life and continue to witness along the way.