I was born in Minnesota in 1951 and educated at Southwest Minnesota State College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa. I am the author of four collections of short stories, Black Maps, Crimes of Passion, Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories, and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II; two books of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers; a collection of craft essays, On Writing Fiction (originally published as Alone With All that Could Happen); and a short monograph on the issue of completion in a work of art, A Crack in Everything: How We Know What's Done Is Done. I have also edited three anthologies, Words Overflown by Stars, an anthology of essays on the craft of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from past and present faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts, The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction, and, with Philip Dacey, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms.

My fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including Arts & Letters, The California Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, upstreet and The Writer's Chronicle. My work has also been read over Voice of America radio and translated into Braille, Spanish, German, Chinese, Hebrew, Indonesian, and Farsi.

My fiction has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, including Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; and The Pushcart Book of Stories: Best Stories from the Pushcart Prize.

My poetry has appeared in 30-plus anthologies, including Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry and The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine.

From 1981 to 1991 I served as fiction editor of Crazyhorse, and I served on the Editorial Board of Hunger Mountain: The Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of Arts & Letters from 2002 to 2014.

In addition to the O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Short Stories selection mentioned above, my awards and honors include the AWP Award for Short Fiction, the Fleur-de-Lis Press Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council, and the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence.

I taught creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock from 1980 until my retirement as a professor emeritus in 2014. I continue to teach in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I have taught since 1998. I live in Little Rock with my wife Judy and our dogs Libby and Sammy. We are proud parents of two grown children, Alison and Steve, both of whom live nearby, Alison with her dogs Prudence, Digby, and Seymour and Steve with his wife Kewen and our darling grandsons Galen and Ethan.

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