I was born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, and educated at Wesleyan University, The Hollins Writing Program, and Washington University. Along the way, I spent time as a student at Ruprecht Karls Universitaet in Heidelberg, Germany and also worked on the Washington news staff of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. I am the author of Strange Wood (1997 Winthrop Poetry Series, available through LSU Press) and editor of The New Young American Poets: An Anthology(Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. My newest poems appear in TriQuarterly, Boulevard, The Antioch Review, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. I can't say exactly how I fell into poetry writing. I used to fantasize about being an historian or an astronomer but am not sure I had the tenacity for the former or the ability for the latter. Although I never managed to acquire the expertise to contribute anything to either field, writing about my interests-why astronomy and history were so fascinating to me-was something I felt I could do. My first poems, collected in Strange Wood, are almost exclusively about those subjects.

When I'm not reading poetry, I still read books on history (especially Roman history), astronomy, and archaeology and see these same themes in the foreground of my newest manuscript, The Finger Bone.

Trompe L'Oeil has many sources. It began with my reading, in National Geographic, about the fate of Henry Hudson, cast adrift with his son by a mutinous crew. I copied a sentence verbatim from the magazine onto the top of a blank page, then began to make connections with other stories I'd read about the disappearances of early explorers. For instance, I had read, in Evan S. Connell's wonderful book, The White Lantern, about the strange plight of a group of explorers in North America who, so beguiled by the vast, empty landscapes in Canada, abandoned their ice-locked ship, piled their escape boats with useless candlesticks and the like, and disappeared into the tundra. Also, I thought about the strange death of Xavier Mertz, a polar explorer who literally vanished into a crevice in front of his men-who were forced to leave him, still alive, behind.

All of these stories, which appear in the middle of the final draft of the poem, were its inspiration. They seemed to confirm for me my worst fears about death and history-that, ultimately, history, like the trompe l'oeil paintings of stars on the roofs of certain cathedrals I'd seen in Europe, was a deceiving thing. By providing backgrounds- dates and interpretations for events-it conceals from us the fact that the people who participated in them do not exist, that they have taken with them not only themselves but all hope of our understanding their predicaments and choices.