He graduated from Hobart College and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College (1975–78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983–84, 1986–87), and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). During the 1990s he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,The Paris Review, Ploughshares, APR, Ironwood, and Quarterly West.