Ed BlockEd Block was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. His father worked field construction throughout the American West in the 1950s and early 60s. The family settled in St. Paul, Minnesota where he attended Nazareth Hall high school and then St. Thomas College. After a year of graduate school at Stanford University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, he spent two years in Malawi, Central Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching at a boarding secondary school near Nkhata Bay. He met his future wife, a lay mission volunteer, when she visited Chikale Beach, a cove just south of Nkhata Bay. On his return to the U.S., he completed his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Stanford, married Mary Helen McLaren, and after a year in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, and two years teaching at Oregon State University, he accepted a tenure-track position at Marquette University, where he taught for thirty-five years. He and his wife raised three talented girls to womanhood. He retired from Marquette as Emeritus Professor in 2012. He began publishing poetry in 1997 with a poem in CrossCurrents. Since then he has published over fifty poems in journals like Spiritus, Review for Religious, Janus Head, Parabola, Nebraska Life, and Lake Country Journal. In 2016 he published a collection of religious poems, Anno Domini. He was interviewed on a local religious radio station and Milwaukee's NPR show, "Lake Effect." His reviews, interviews, and essays on literary topics and attentiveness in everyday life have appeared in America, Image, Commonweal, Logos, U.S. Catholic, and a variety of other journals. He continues to write poems and essays, tend a garden, and enjoy retirement in Greendale, Wisconsin. Read More Read Less