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I moved to Tucson, Arizona, at the age of nine when I slowly and painfully learned to become a child of the desert, taking my first lessons in the front range of the Santa Catalina Mountains. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in biology, I joined the creative writing workshop of poet and author Richard Shelton and soon began publishing articles and essays about the natural history of the Southwest.
While mentoring with Richard Shelton, my writing began appearing in national magazines and literary journals like Arizona Highways, Bird Watcher's Digest, Manoa, Northern Lights, Alligator Juniper, Puerto Del Sol, and the Gettysburg Review. Several of these essays, in turn, were selected for anthologies such as American Nature Writing, Getting Over the Color Green, and David Quammen's The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. Editors have nominated two of my essays for Pushcart Prizes, and Robert Atwan of The Best American Essays series listed my work in "Notable Essays of 1998" and again in "Notable Essays of 1999."
In January 2000, Mercury House published my first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire, to critical acclaim. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, "...entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays...". The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing.
After I completed my MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona, I continued writing and publishing essays and books about the Southwest. In 2015, The University of Arizona Press published my sixth book, Chasing Arizona, which deals my travels to 52 destinations in 52 weeks, experiencing the people, places, and treasures that make our state great. Today, I live with my wife in an 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee, Arizona.
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