I am a theoretical physicist currently employed at Duke University in the Physics Department, where I teach various bits of physics esoterica to graduate and undergraduate students and conduct original research on a variety of topics. I am married to a rather beautiful physician (Susan F. Isbey, M.D.) who is an internist in private practice in Durham with a subspecialty of infectious disease (a way cool branch of medicine). We have three charming sons, aged sixteen, twelve and seven months as of this writing (they were only just born to nine when I first wrote this introduction many years ago). We also share our house with a cat named Luci(fer) who is very tolerant of boys and dogs. The dogs are represented currently by only Buttercup, a fat yellow lab with no hips, and Satchmo, a black border collie mix who is both sweet and slightly nuts.
In addition to a Ph.D. and B.S. degree in physics from Duke University, I completed the work for a B.A. in philosophy (Duke at the time didn't formally recognize a double major in humanities and sciences). I have completed at least masters level work in mathematics, and am a systems and network administrator and (Unix or DOS) systems engineer/computer consultant in my not particularly copious spare time.
So how did a perfectly ordinary computer/mathematics/physics nerd like myself manage to write three books of poetry? What do physics, math, poetry and philosophy have in common? More than you might think - see some of the musings on my philosophy pages. And anyway, nerds read books!
I have read approximately a book (full sized novel) a day for at least twenty of my forty one years of age, and gave up the book a day thing only when kids, my own writing, and a compulsion for doing New York Times crosswords intervened. I write extensively, both professionally (I have a long list of publications in Physical Review and elsewhere) and for fun. I have been writing poetry since the age of eight or nine, and many of the poems in this work date back to my college days. My favorite poets are W. B. Yeats (da man), A., Lord Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot in roughly that order, although I also enjoy Blake, Kipling, and many, many others.
So, I'm not just a technogeek. I am, at worst, a generalist-geek. In addition to the specific fields of physics, mathematics, general computing, philosophy and literature where I am professionally competent, I am a better-than-average fisherman, possess the skills required to build a house from the ground up (I worked construction for a while), operate an extensive kitchen/house garden, can do intermediate level auto servicing and repairs, and am a house-husband who does all the cooking and more than half the housework and child rearing in favor of my time-bound physician wife. The amazing thing isn't that I can write poetry; it is that I ever have time to write anything.