He sprouted up in the smallish, port city of Duluth, Minnesota in a fundamentalist Christian family, so most days of the week were filled with the cadence of the King James Version, hymns, and simmering repression.

After high school, rebellious and carrying a healthy chip on his shoulder, he left home to ride Greyhounds and thumb rides around the West Coast, emerging with a new vision and purpose—to transfer, through careful attention, the observable world to the page. He became especially interested in the experiences of work and working people and in fringe communities and subcultures.

Looking for more formal guidance, he enrolled at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia as a scholarship student were he studied poetry under Jericho Brown. From Atlanta, he moved to New York City and, in 2019, received an MFA in Poetry Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Since then, he’s wandered a bit—from central Mexico to rural Vermont to upstate New York—before settling in Minneapolis where he is working, writing, making art, and laying the groundwork to open an independent publishing press by, for, and about working people.