About Me

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror."

Since 2005, I have been a professor of English, first at Tarleton State University and currently at Texas Woman's University where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses and direct dissertations in rhetoric. Rhetoric is one of the oldest intellectual traditions of the West and was a foundational department of study as the first European universities were founded, an essential component of the Latin Trivium. Rhetoric is the exploration of language and what it means to be a human communicating. And, well, I like communicating quite a bit!  I hold a PhD from TCU, home of the Horned Frogs. 

"Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me."

I am a native son of Texas, a scion of its endless expanses of prairies and grasses and the towers, shops, and bars of Dallas/Fort Worth, equally at home under the Big Sky or in the big cities. My favorite pastimes are having a drink or a coffee in a local hotel, talking to passers-through about their lives and homes or settling into a library or archive and communicating with those long (or recently) gone through the papers and ephemera they left behind. My family and friends are enormously important to me and I hold them close even as I live in splendid solitude with fearless Toby Chihuahua.