Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing is my third book. My previous ones include the memoirs Love's Labors: A Memoir of Marriage and Divorce (Riverhead, 1998) and Great Expectation: A Father's Diary (Iowa, 2008). My personal essays and journalism have appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Journal, Chautauqua, Under the Sun, Stone Canoe, Iowa Alumni Magazine, and other places. My poetry has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Stone Canoe, and JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association. 

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I grew up on Air Force bases throughout the midwestern United States (with a brief detour in Las Vegas), and have since lived in West Virginia, Arkansas, Antigua, and, since 2001, upstate New York.

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I earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Dayton (Ohio), after which I served in the US Peace Corps as a math teacher, and then soon left engineering to work with words rather than with numbers. I went to Ohio State University for an MA in English, worked for two years as a reporter on a small, weekly newspaper, and then completed a MA in Nonfiction Writing and a PhD in English at the University of Iowa.

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I'm an Associate Professor at Le Moyne College, in Syracuse, New York, where I teache courses in literature, nonfiction writing, journalism, media ethics, and photography. I also currently direct the college's Creative Writing Program. 

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I am an extremely satisfied client of Strauss Eye Prosthetics, Inc., of Rochester, New York. 

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(photo by Matthew Turner)

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