Born in Detroit, 1968. Raised in Grosse Pointe Park, a suburb of Detroit,
educated in public schools there & then in a Catholic high school, De
LaSalle Collegiate, taught by the LaSallean Christian Brothers. Post-
secondary education at the University of Chicago, the College, earning
an AB in English literature in 1990, albeit with a one-year stint at Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, to study poetry (with poet & classicist Jim
Powell). Three years of wage-slavery followed: eighteen months at a
correspondence high school on the South Side of Chicago, another
eighteen as a researcher at the City Colleges of Chicago. In 1993 began
studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, earning a
Master of Arts in Divinity in 1994 & a PhD in Divinity, specializing in
Religion & Literature, in 1999. In the midst of this, some movement:
notably, a period traveling in Greece in 1994, including a visit to the holy
island of Patmos where Orthodox iconography was discovered & a year
spent living in Vienna in 1997-8, where coffee & opera were discovered.
More notably & somewhat earlier, epistolary contact with poet Ronald
Johnson was initiated in 1992, followed by a few valuable meetings in
San Francisco. Mentored by RJ until his death, in 1998. Not before being
asked by the ailing poet to be his literary executor. This charge has
resulted in two books: To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman
House, 2000); The Shrubberies, a collection of last poems (Flood
Editions, 2001); & a reprinting of Radi os (Flood Editions, 2005). As well
as various archival tasks, ongoing. So far, two books of poetry:
Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) & Depth Theology (Georgia,
2006). Also one critical book, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the
Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan, 2002). Since late 2001, following eighteen
months in St. Louis, residency in Berwyn, a working-class suburb on the
west side of Chicago, in a house, with wife, Rebecca Houze, an art
historian, & two sons, Gabriel & Lucian. Teacher at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago.
e-mail me: peter [at] luxhominem [dot] com
photo by Eirik Steinhoff