Life
He grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. He graduated from Loras College and the University of Chicago. He married Loretta D'Agostino in 1960. He taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and California State University, Sacramento. His students include Raymond Carver, Charlene Ungstad and Gary Short.
He opposes the death penalty and protests executions in California every time they take place.
His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Paris Review, the Chicago Review and Zyzzyva.
He lives in Sacramento.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Schmitz
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Peasants are a rude lot, and hard: life has hardened their hearts, but they are thick and awkward only in appearance; you have to know them. No one is more sensitive to what gives man the right to call himself a man: good-heartedness, bravery and virile brotherhood.”
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“The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)