He has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is a published essayist. He is the author of Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War and Rendezvous With Death: American Poems of the Great War. He was the recipient of a year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2002, and resides in Sycamore. Books by this author will be available for sale, contributed by Barnes and Noble, on the evening of the event.