The author is a retired politics professor from California and New York who grew up in the Southwest enamored of the sights and scents of the desert, who has always been sad that he missed the heyday of the frontier. Poetry has always been central in his life, even while he pursued a career and a living teaching political ideas. In recent years he has focused almost entirely on writing poems, however, giving him the opportunity to compile a second résumé. Charles currently lives on the shore, in Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and Nikki and Jesse their standard female poodles.