After graduating from Hollins College in Virginia with a MA in Creative Writing in 1964, I published two books of poetry. While earning a Ph.D. from SUNY-Buffalo, I studied with Leslie Fiedler, Robert Creeley, and others. Beginning in 1968, I taught at Queens College, CUNY for forty years. During that time I published books on contemporary American poetry, Marianne Moore, Donald Barthelme, and Gary Snyder, and served as the editor of the Modern Period for the Heath Anthology of American Literature. In 1979, 1993, 1998, and 2001, I was a visiting professor in France, three times in Paris and once in Toulouse. In the Spring of 2006 I was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2009 I published a biography of Alain Locke (U. of Chicago Press), much of which was written while I was at the American Academy. In 2012, I had two new books appear: the first full-length biography of Countee Cullen (from U. of Chicago Press in September), and a volume of Alain Locke's essays (in June, from Oxford University Press). My column on the visual arts appears regularly in Salmagundi. I am currently at work on two books: a study of the relationship between J. P. Morgan and Roger Fry, and a collection of my art column essays written for Salmagundi.