Leonard Neufeldt graduated summa cum laude from Waterloo Lutheran University (Wilfred Laurier) and received his MA and Ph.D in the USA. He was appointed Professor of American Studies at Purdue University in 1978. He and his wife have spent most of their professional years in America and abroad, notably in Europe and Turkey. Lecture tours have taken him to India (twice), Germany, Korea and China. "Rootless lives may be as endemic to the Canadian and American West as root-bound ones," he laments, "but in a world of change, there is little defense for either condition."Neufeldt's scholarly essays and books have been published with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Princeton University Press, among others. More recently his ninth book of poetry, Nearness, has appeared (Silver Bow Publishing 2020). The greater part of this collection could be described as a Northwest and Pacific homecoming. More generally, Neufeldt's poetry considers revolutions, wars, the Holocaust, the power of individual and cultural memory, language as social process, travel and foreign residence as cultural tutorial and, not least, life in and with nature.