He graduated from Yale University. He served 3 years in the Navy.He worked at a sawmill in New Hampshire, moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a corporate copywriter and journalist. He edited Ploughshares.He lived with his wife and three sons in rural Massachusetts.

He teaches at University of Virginia,and the Napa Writers' Conference.

• "Norfolk, 1969", Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1986

• (reprint 1991)