about pbj

I’m a Jersey guy. I was born in Passaic in 1945 and raised in Wood-Ridge where I wound up being the middle child among five. After high school, I went to St. Francis College in Maine, and then went west, sort of, to do graduate work at John Carroll University in University Heights, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. I started teaching high school English in Parma, OH. In 1972, I moved to New England, taking a teaching position on the North Shore of Massachusetts. My next teaching position was in Maine in 1978.

While I was teaching, I published a number of books, wrote for a lot of educational journals, and began speaking at conferences.  After 22 years in the classroom, I left teaching in 1990, when my daughter, Emma, was born. Since that time, I worked as a visiting writer in hundreds of school from Maine to Alaska and at international schools in Europe. I also continued to write and create poetry anthologies. I have published about 55 books, mostly poetry anthologies, but also a couple of novels for young readers, books of my own poetry, nonfiction books, and guides for teachers.