I was born in Washington, D.C. three blocks from the White House at the tail end of the 1960s, and spent my early childhood in the suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. When I was eight, my parents separated and my father moved to New York City. I would visit my dad every other weekend, and came to feel the city was my second home.

In high school I moved to a small rural town in Pennsylvania; my biweekly visits to the city continued. The contrast between small town life on weekdays and the ruckus of Manhattan on weekends was an ordinary fact of life for me, but to friends at school it seemed exotic and hard to believe. New York was a five-hour drive from the town of Selinsgrove, but culturally it was like two different countries.

I went college for architecture in Chicago. I quickly discovered I enjoyed my extracurricular and electives more than my architecture classes. In high school, I had loved writing for and laying out the student newspaper, and when I walked into the office of the college’s weekly newspaper, they immediately put me to work. I interviewed the school’s new president for a cover story that I then pasted up on the front page.

When the spring semester began, the assistant editor, Robert, told me the rest of the newspaper’s staff had quit. They were simply too busy with their school work. Robert and I were the only ones left. Also, over the winter break, several large white cardboard boxes had been delivered to the newspaper office. What was in those boxes set my later career in motion.

There was a new computer, a Macintosh. There was a printer and a scanner. There were several boxes of software, including something called Adobe Pagemaker. I unpacked and set it all up and worked out how to lay out the paper on the computer. Later that week, instead of delivering a stack of camera-ready pages to our printer, I handed him a floppy disk. It was 1988. I never used a hot wax roller or border tape again.

The following term I did not reenroll for fall classes. I knew architecture was not right for me, so while I figured out what to do instead I went home to New York and found work at the Strand Book Store. Each week we were paid in envelopes of cash, and like a lot of the staff, I handed a good portion of that cash back to the store, using the employee discount on books.

A year later I transferred to a small liberal arts school in rural Ohio. I switched my major to English and pursued the creative writing track in poetry with Daniel Bourne, the school’s sole creative writing teacher. He involved me and other students in the workings of the literary journal Artful Dodge, which he founded and edited. Meantime, I helped establish a student literary magazine, Goliard, serving as editor-in-chief for two years.

With Bourne’s support I was able to join a summer workshop in Columbia’s MFA program the summer before my senior year of college. Many of the students in that program went on to notable careers as poets.

That same summer I also had an internship as an editorial assistant at Ecco Press, the preeminent literary publisher. On my desk was a fat Rolodex that included a card for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that had her personal phone number. I found myself on phone calls with eminent poets, the poetry editor of the New Yorker and editors of other esteemed publications. It was a heady experience.

As an undergraduate I had incredible opportunities to learn from masters of the art as a young poet and writer, including poets Derek Walcott, Cynthia MacDonald, Richard Howard, Fleda Brown Jackson, and the fiction writers William Least Heat Moon and Tim O’Brien. I got some great stories out of those experiences I could tell you over a beer.

After graduating, I made my way to New York to work in book publishing, settling in Brooklyn, where I met my wife. Those desktop publishing skills got me into the marketing side of the business, which led to designing and building web sites, including this one.

When our second son was born, we left the city for New England, spending five idyllic years in Concord, New Hampshire. Work ultimately drew us back to the New York area, and we moved to the New Jersey suburbs where we live today.