In his long career as a professional gardener, Charles Goodrich has cultivated a wry empathy for bugs, birds, flowers and weeds.   His poems and essays are rife with the smells, sounds and precise visual details of a nature intimately known, of creatures living together in "a ceremony / of appetite." In all his work, an inquiring sensibility rubs noses with an everywhere-intelligent world.

          He is the author of a volume of poems, Insects of South Corvallis (Cloudbank Books, 2003), a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building his own house, The Practice of Home (Lyons Press, 2004).  His poems and essays have appeared in Orion, The Sun, Open Spaces, Willow Springs, Zyzzyva and many other magazines. A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on his National Public Radio Program, The Writer's Almanac. 

          Goodrich worked for twenty-five years as a professional gardener and has also worked as a correctional work crew supervisor, a short-order cook, and a carpenter, and now serves as Program Director for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University. Goodrich lives and gardens in Corvallis, Oregon.

Charles Goodrich ©2010