My most recent poetry chapbook is called Mapping the Valley: Hospital Poems, and it’s a collaboration with my son Micah James Bauman. It was published in the Editor’s Series at Seven Kitchens Press in 2021.

My second chapbook,  Angels & Adultery was selected by Nickole Brown for the Robin Becker Chapbook Series and published by Seven Kitchens Press in May of 2018.

My first chapbook, Moons, Roads, and Rivers was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

My poems have appeared in various literary magazines and journals, including New Ohio Review, Watershed Review, The Citron Review, Barely South Review, and Contemporary American Voices. Book reviews have appeared in Windhover and Whale Road Review.

For three years I served as the editor-in-chief of Word Fountain, the Literary Magazine of the Osterhout Free Library. A librarian by day, I enjoy birding, hiking, and camping with my three grown sons, in the woodlands of Pennsylvania where I live with my favorite pianist.

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Father and . . . Birder?

This blog used to be called The Dad Poet. That’s Dad Poet, not Dead Poet. What kind of father would I be if I did not tell dreadful dad-jokes?

I started this site a dozen years ago as a place of refuge and inner peace. I needed to focus on my writing again, and blogging seemed a good way to keep the writing muscles limber. If I wasn’t exactly writing poems, I was keeping my appointments with the muse, as Mary Oliver might say.

It was a difficult time, so I decided I would focus on the things that made me feel most happy and alive. These things were poetry, fatherhood, and nature, specifically birding and hawk watching.

Soon enough, it turned into a poetry blog from a dad’s point of view. A dad who also happened to be a “lazy” birder (Yeah, I don’t get up at 5:30 am to hit the hot spots for pre-dawn bird calls). You’ll also find a fair amount of other people’s poems that I have recorded on my SoundCloud and YouTube channels before I shared them here.

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My Weird Resume

My first experience with “What Work Is” was being a porter (fancy word for janitor) in a donut shop, and then a retail sales boy in my hometown’s premier men’s clothing store. Later, I was both a cleaner and a driver of buses, school vans mostly. I even did some roofing and painting work and took a short stint on a borough road-work crew.

I have been a choir director, a Sunday school teacher, a youth minister, a skeptic, and eventually, an activist for gay parents, and a webmaster for one of the largest global groups of gay fathers.

I was an English major who studied education, linguistics, and, of all things, religion. I worked as a cruise-tour co-host, a radio personality, a waiter, a restaurant manager, a customer service representative, and a voice for a major national weather company.

In Summary

Those three sons of mine are grown young men now, and one of them has become a fine poet in his own right. I live with my long-term partner and husband-to-be in Northeast Pennsylvania where I work as a public library director.

I’ve gotten hands dirty and heart broken. I think I’m on my third life by now.

How nice it was of you to have taken the time to read this far and become acquainted with me. I hope you enjoy the poems.