He earned his B.A. in English at the University of Memphis and his M.F.A at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He also has a Ph.D. in English with a creative writing dissertation from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Pate is a poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in La Petite Zine, storySouth, Cream City Review, Black Warrior Review, Blue Mesa Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Pembroke Magazine, Juked, and Bayou Magazine, among other places. He is the author of The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2013), a poetry collection inspired by the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.