When I was in high school and I said I wanted to be a writer, almost nobody took seri­ously the pos­si­bil­ity that I might suc­ceed, includ­ing me. I fan­ta­sized, of course, about becom­ing famous, but when I was hon­est with myself, I couldn’t imag­ine I had any­thing to say that peo­ple would actu­ally want to read. So now, when I look at the books I have pub­lished, I mar­vel at, and am hum­bled by, the fact that I have become what I said I wanted to be when I grew up, some­thing that most peo­ple I know can­not say. I am not famous, at least not the way I imag­ined I might be when I was a kid, and I don’t need to be. Peo­ple read my books. I know they do because they tell me about it, and while I would be lying if I said I didn’t want more peo­ple to read them, or if I said I didn’t want more crit­ics to pay atten­tion to what I have to say — because I, of course, think that what I have to say should com­mand such atten­tion — the truth is that my ego is not what mat­ters. What I have to say, after all, might turn out to be, in the larger scope of things, pro­foundly insignif­i­cant. What mat­ters is that my books find their way to the read­ers in whose lives they can make a dif­fer­ence, which I am grat­i­fied to say they have been doing. And that’s enough.

Poetry

• The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006)

Trans­la­tions

• A Bird in the Gar­den of Angels (Mazda Pub­lish­ers, 2007), with John Moyne
• Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan (Global Schol­arly Pub­li­ca­tions, 2006)
• Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan (Global Schol­arly Pub­li­ca­tions, 2004)