He graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He practices medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. His writing focuses on themes that promote equality and justice for gay people, people of color, and working-class people.

He served as a resident poet at Brandeis University and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He frequently reads at colleges, including Brown University, Stanford University, and Colby-Sawyer College.He currently instructs in the Lesley University low-residency MFA writing program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1994)
• What the Body Told (1996)
• The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry (1997)
• Diva (1999)
• Landscape with Human Figure (2002)

8 The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry (2003).