I'm a native Texan who now lives in Kansas and teaches English at a community college in Wichita. I grew up in a family who, as an uncle once said, had the only Goldwater sticker on their car in Austin in 1964, but as I've become older I've become more liberal politically, more moderate socially.

In addition to Texas and Kansas, I've lived in Mobile, Alabama, and, for two years, in Durango, Mexico.

As a student of American literature and culture, I'm more interested in politics as a space for talking about ideas, how those ideas mesh, or don't, with American ideals, than as a partisan cage-fight. That's why I'm here rather than at Daily Kos.

I'm looking forward to engaging with visitors to this site who feel the same way.