He received his bachelor's degree in English at UT Arlington in 1992 and his MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993 and is still listed on the faculty there. He was taught in the Amherst College EXCEL program since 1998. During the 2003-04 academic year, he was a visiting writer at Hampshire College, and for the last two years he was a visiting associate professor of fiction writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. A prolific writer, his collection of short stories, Good as Any, was selected by Amazon.com as one of the books of the year in 2002.