I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.
I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an English literature degree and travelled for a year before going to work.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
With my ministry of light, part of what I do is work on the California Alliance For Arts Education.
I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.
When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.