He graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is also a Fulbright Scholar. He became a dual faculty member at the University of Iowa where he teaches creative nonfiction in the English Department and also acts as a public humanities scholar at the university’s Carver Institute of Macular Degeneration. For years, he has acted as a speaker on education, diversity, public policy, and disability. Kuusisto learned to read Braille at the age of thirty-nine and has produced, and continues to produce professional works of poetry and literature.[