He served as poet laureate of Utah from 2012 to 2017. In 2007 he received the Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been published widely in many of the top poetry journals in the country, including Poetry, The New Republic, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Orion, JuxtaProse and the 2005 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has been described as embodying a "quaintly romantic notion that mortality and love and soul are the abiding themes of life and art."[1][2]