My career reflects the ideals and aspirations of the late 1960s and early 1970s—years that I devoted to graduate studies, civil rights work, and teaching at the City College of New York. With significant social change afoot, and with so many opportunities for young people to make a difference, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the prospects of what I saw as the relatively elite and insulated life of college teaching. I wanted to live without confining myself to a college campus, or even to America.  I was eager to teach in settings that would enlarge my life; and I was determined to enter communities where I 'didn’t belong,' using whatever skills I could muster as a writer to help disadvantaged people bring their lives and their voices into print.  I wanted to write about issues well beyond the range of my literary studies—books that would be accessible to non-academic readers.

I’ve accomplished much of what I set out to do.  I've spent chunks of my life living in rural Tennessee, Iran, Oregon, France, and India.  My teaching and writing have been supported by grants from the National Foundation for the Humanities, the New York Foundation of the Arts, by three Fulbright Teaching Fellowships, and by writing residencies at The MacDowell Colony.  Along the way, I’ve enjoyed the support of people I very much admire: Dr. Kenneth Clark, Robert Coles, Julian Bond, Leslie Fiedler, and Stanley Kutler.  The books that emerged from my work cover several genres: oral history, personal journalism, biography, travel/memoir, and fiction.  Also, I produced and directed a documentary film, Freedom's Front Line: Fayette County, Tennessee, that has aired numerous times on WKNO, the PBS affiliate in Memphis, and received the Director’s Choice award at the Black Maria Film Festival.  I’m now working on a novel that takes me back to the early 1970s, but I’m still living my life forward.  Those of you acquainted with Tristram Shandy will understand: I’m here and there.  All in all, it’s just where I want to be.

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