Tell me a little about yourself. I grew up in South Texas–San Antonio, which is inland, and Rockport, which is on the coast. After graduating with an MA from the University of Texas I lived in New York for four years and worked in the publishing industry, and then to save myself from the fate of being an editor the rest of my life, returned to graduate school in Houston and received a PhD. I taught in Texas for a couple years, then joined the faculty here at Penn State in 1995. Generally I teach creative writing, but also hybrid classes of creative writing/literature, such as I’m doing this fall in an Honors course titled The Magic of Blood, about literature of the Southwest.