"Though The Long Way Home is my first published book, I have been a writer, performer, teacher, and student of literature and the humanities for all my adult life. Most important to me was the period in which I was a performance artist. As a performing artist, I was interested in how a poet or writer transforms an image into metaphor. I imagined a physical space or moment of time between the formation of a metaphor and when a writer or poet writes it on a piece of paper or taps it out on a keyboard. I wanted to emote for an audience the first words of discovery. It is in this spirit that I wrote The Long Way Home. I have tried to imagine the present moment using the power of discovery to invite the reader into the same experience. Wherever possible, I’ve used context to inform each image with meaning rather than explaining its importance. I hope this approach will help readers imagine and understand my experience and also to imagine themselves undergoing a similar experience of self-discovery.
I also worked for many years in the social/economic justice field of community development. In that time, I worked both for a bank and a federal regulatory agency. Community development largely came about because of the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. It is the last major piece of federal civil rights legislation. Through it, the federal government monitors the extent to which banks provide access to financial services for low- and moderate-income people and low- and moderate-income communities. Because of the historic correlation between race and poverty in America, this has meant working primarily in communities of color. In my final years, I worked on community development in economically distressed communities in the rural Midwest.
I live in the City of Chicago with my wife and our son."