I was born in 1940, and in 1944 my mother, divorced from her first husband, married the sculptor and Opus 40 creator Harvey Fite, so I grew up with Opus 40 being created in my back yard, which has given me a tremendous respect for the creative process – an awareness that art comes from the making, not the conceiving. I grew up largely in Woodstock, where my most significant mentors and role models, beyond my stepfather, were the artist Anton Refregier and the writers Howard Koch and Heywood Hale Broun. I attended Bard College from 1957-59, where I met the poet Donald Finkel, probably my most significant mentor. I dropped out of Bard, but my friendship with Finkel, and my looking to him as a mentor, continued for the rest of his life. In 1960, I found myself at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I studied with Donald Justice and Philip Roth, and studied painting with Woodstock artist Eugene Ludins. I found myself as a writer in Iowa. It took me a lot longer to find myself as a graphic artist, and in that field I was mostly self-taught – by carrying a sketchbook with me everywhere. In 1962 I had my first publication (in Poetry magazine), and in 1963 I began writing for the cutting edge satire magazine, The Realist. In 1969 I sold my first novel, and I have stayed in that line of work ever since. My body count to date is something like three dozen books – fiction, nonfiction and poetry. After my stepfather died in 1977, I worked with my mother to set up the nonprofit organization which runs Opus 40, and after my mother died in 1986, my wife and I became stewards of Opus 40 for the next 30 years; I have always taken the practice of making art seriously – pen and ink mostly, until I started digital painting about three decades ago, and fiber art within the last five years – but I have not diligently pursued a career in the art biz. My work has been shown in various galleries, including Emerge Gallery in Saugerties and ASK in Kingston, and it has illustrated a few books, including the cover of my recent Jazz With a Beat (SUNY Press), and the cover of a recent issue of Caribbean Compass magazine.