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The Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English, I have taught at »Ê¼Ò»ªÈË since 1998. My teaching interests fiction writing, film, 20th- and 21st-century world literatures, and critical theory. I often work with students interested in lives as creative writers.

I am the author or editor of nineteen books: the novels Cry Uncle (2006),Whale Man (2011), The Committee on Town Happiness (2014), and Christmas in July (2018); and the books of poems Days Like Prose (1997), The Vandals (1999), Love Song with Motor Vehicles (2003), The Penates (2006), Elephants & Butterflies (2007), Ten Days (2010, with painter Herb Jackson), Long Division (2012), The Ladder (2016), and The Age of Discovery (2020). My next book, a collection of flash fictions and Bingo card stories, Bingo Bango Boingo, will be published by Dzanc Books in February of 2025.

I am also a cartoonist, with work exhibited in galleries across the United States. Over 110 of my cartoons have been published in Identity Theory, where I contribute work weekly.

I have edited five scholarly works: as co-editor of The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Poetry (1996), editor for North America of Who's Who in 20th Century World Poetry (2001), editor of The Imaginary Poets (2006), and co-editor of The Manifesto Project (2017). More than 250 poems and stories of mine have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. I have published essays and reviews in journals such as The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker; and been awarded residency fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Corporation of Yaddo, Fundacíon Valparaiso, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

My poems have been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, two inclusions in Best American Poetry; the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the Lunate 500 Prize; the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; and the 2013, 2014, and 2019 Randall Jarrell Prizes. In 2021, six of my Bingo cards were awarded the Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review for the best poems published in the journal that year. Other awards include the North Carolina Book Award, and the Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for "Book of the Year."

In 2021, I judged the National Book Award in fiction; in 2024, I judged the PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. In 2024, I received a North Carolina Humanities Fellowship for a manuscript in progress, One Million Likes: Understanding Cartooning in a Digital Age.