Meet Carl

​Carl was born and raised in the rural Thumb Area of Michigan. His primary school years were spent learning in an old two-room schoolhouse, working summers on his uncle’s farm, and listening to his grandmother’s stories from her tiny trailer home, sifting through drawers of ancient photographs while savoring her freshly baked breads. Those experiences shaped his love of simplicity and storytelling.

After receiving a Creative Writing MA from Central Michigan University, he embarked on a career in business that took him – and his young family – around the world, while continuing to write and submit poetry, occasionally published in small presses. After a 30-year career in finance, telling stories with numbers, he has returned to the roots given him by his grandmother.
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Carl lives with his family in McKinney, TX.

What does Carl like to read?

Favorite Authors - Fiction

  1. William Shakespeare - hands down, Carl’s favorite…for never letting facts stand in the way  of a good story.
  2. Heinrich Boll - a master storyteller who set the record straight on the lasting impact of WWII on the German people.
  3. Ernest Hemmingway - a journalistic approach to storytelling that gave us rich landscapes and memorable characters to live in them…brutal reminders of our humanity.
  4. Franz Kafka - shaped a surreal world of entrapment, filled with trepidation of what lay just around the corner. Not exactly “pleasurable,” Kafka’s work was mesmerizing.
  5. John Grisham - because who doesn’t like the occasional damaged lawyer, drowning in his own hubris, facing a client whose only hope is him/her?

Favorite Authors - Poetry

  1. ​William Shakespeare - it isn’t fair, right…? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
  2. T.S. Elliot - gave us some of the most compelling poetry of the early 20th century, warning of mankind’s focus on “progress” at all costs.
  3. Robert Frost - who valued simplicity and the lyrical nature of the English language.
  4. Carroll Arnett - my grad school mentor who taught me economy of language and listening to the space between words.
  5. Walt Whitman - who gave America her first voice of authentically new American poetry.