He is perhaps best known as the author of The End of Respectability (Godine, 2024) and Mississippi: An American Journey'' (Knopf, 1997) as well as a chapbook of poems, Cricket Weather.
He is also the coauthor, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, of the best-selling Brothers-in-Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, and coeditor, with Michael S. Harper, of The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry.
[3] When he was a child his parents would rent a cabin on Lake Michigan near Escanaba, which he has remembered into his adult life.
During his time at the University of Notre Dame he came across the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens which had a major impact on him.
[8] Currently he is a writer-in-residence at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine teaching creative writing and American poetry while also researching a variety of topics.