I grew up in the village of Brookside, New Jersey. In the 1960s, it was a bucolic mix of dairy farmers, working-class laborers and white-collar businessmen like my father who commuted to Manhattan two hours each way. Brookside is the setting of Philip Roth's novel 'American Pastoral.'
The poet James Merrill is my distant cousin. I absolutely adored him. The postcards I received from him were always signed, ‘Your amazed cousin.’ He was a formative influence on my writing.
My first ancestor in the New World, Roger Williams, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for arguing that the King of England was not Christ’s vicar on Earth and thus had no claims on Native American lands.
He founded Rhode Island, enshrined the notion of liberty of conscience and argued for the separation of church and state. He was called a genial radical and is the subject of my next book, ‘The Trials of Roger Williams.’ He wrote ‘A Key into the Language of America,’ a phrasebook and ethnographic study of the Narragansett Indians.
At the UW, I studied poetry with David Wagoner, Bill Matthews and Leslie Norris; fiction with Charles Johnson; and Old English with Robert Stevick, for whom I translated up to 100 lines a night of ‘Beowulf,’ the foundation of my poetic identity.
Professor Charles Johnson began my master’s defense by asking whether a short story writer is a failed novelist and if a poet is a failed short story writer, at which point the faculty began an argument that lasted nearly for 30 minutes. Then professor Colleen McElroy asked me if I had anything to add. I said, “no.” And that was my defense.
Poetry Northwest published my first poem, ‘A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball.’
As a journalist, I covered the World Cup in Italy in order to write my first prose book, ‘The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer.’ I also covered the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia, which led to two more books—and, likely, my job in Iowa.
In 2000, I became the director of the international writing program at the University of Iowa, which until a few months ago had a 58-year-long partnership with the U.S. state department to connect writers from around the globe with the Iowa City literary community. I’ve led cultural diplomacy missions to more than 50 countries.