I was born and raised in New Hampshire, have degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School, and have been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years working with families challenged by poverty, substance abuse, and domestic violence. I write to survive. I started sending work out three years ago with very modest goals (I hoped to have a half dozen poems published by my fiftieth birthday in 2004) but have had somewhat surprising success, with nearly 1200 poems accepted or published by 250 journals including American Writing, The Café Review, Chiron Review, Feminist Studies, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of Medical Humanities, The Larcom Review,  Minnesota Review,  Nimrod, Poet Lore,  Rattle, and Whiskey Island Magazine.  A book of my “medical” poems, The Patient Presents, was published by The People’s Press in Baltimore and a chapbook of very different material,  “I am going to walk toward th! e sanctuary,” was published by Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. I received  a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece (from Gravity Presses) in 2000, my first year of submission and again in 2002. This spring I received a contract to publish a second chapbook, “Blues: Songs for Desdemona,” with Via Dolorosa Press and to publish At the Monkey-Feast Table with ZeBook Company, a new online poetry publisher. The People’s Press has recently accepted another manuscript, tentatively entitled “Late” for publication in January 2004.

Poetry