I currently teach and do research in information
design as an associate professor of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota
Duluth. My wife
and I moved to Duluth in July of 2001 from San José, California
where, for two year s, 
I was the Associate Director of San José State
University's eCampus.
From 1992 to 1999, I taught American literature, creative writing and electronic composition at Kansas State University, where I also served as Director of Computers, Literature and Rhetoric.
I earned my Ph.D. in American literature from Florida State University in 1994, where I also edited the literary magazine Sundog: The Southeast Review. My doctoral dissertation examined prefaces to nineteenth-century novels to explain how authors rhetorically constructed images of their readers and of themselves. I have a Master's degree in creative writing (fiction) from Florida State University. My master's thesis, The Great Indoors, is a collection of short stories set among people who worked in shopping malls during the 1980s. Several of these stories have been published in California Quarterly, The William and Mary Review, and anthologized in a collection by Snake Nation Press. I earned my B.A. in English (creative writing) in 1979 from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
