is the author of books including The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, winner of the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award; The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible, winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize; Ode to the Earth in Translation, a collection of stories; The Worst May Be Over, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award; and The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.