In 2000, I was the 17th recipient of the Award for Faculty Excellence from the Trustees of Wright State University. The award is presented to one faculty member each year in recognition of sustained excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service.

I received my Ph.D. from Lehigh University in 1989, where I was a teaching and research fellow. Before coming to Wright State, I taught as an adjunct professor at Lehigh, Cedar Crest College, Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, and Northampton County Area Community College.

I am an avid reader of mystery-suspense novels and have collected nearly the full run of books (mostly in paperback) by about two dozen writers ranging from Michael Avallone, Erle Stanley Gardner, Richard Prather, and John D. MacDonald, to James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. I have taught an interdisciplinary Honors seminar called "There Are No Butlers Any More: The Mystery Novel as a Cultural Artifact," and I have used mystery novels in several other courses. I maintain a list called Detectives, by Profession at my web site. It received a nice write-up in the Summer 2004 issue of Scene of a Crime. I welcome any suggestions for additions and corrections.

I am the author of Western American Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland: 1995). My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the following books: the Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes on Hardboiled American Novelists, Recent American Mystery Novelists, Early American Nature Poets, 20th-Century American Nature Poets, and University Presses; The Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature; The Encyclopedia of African-American Literature; Asian-American Novelists; The Encyclopedia of Native American Literature; The Encyclopedia of Beat Culture; The Encyclopedia of Children’s and Young Adult Literature; The Cyclopedia of World Authors, The Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, and A Guide to Juvenile and Young Adult Literature. I am also currently working on or have recently completed articles for essay collections on James Purdy, Robert Stone, and Asian gothic fiction.

I have also contributed articles to the following periodicals: The Journal of Imagism, Notes on Contemporary Literature, TEXT Technology, AURCO Journal, AURCO Newsletter, Cyberfict, and the WAC Newsletter of Wright State University. I am a regular contributor to Lectionary Homiletics, and I am currently writing articles for special issues of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Cercles, and Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature. I have written more than 80 book reviews. I contributed regularly to The Mystery Review and Best Sellers, and I have also written reviews for Western American Literature, Christianity Today, and several newsletters. In addition to contributing reviews to The Mystery Reader, I currently contribute reviews to each issue of BookPage.

More than 200 of my poems have appeared in literary journals.