I was born in Mississippi, raised in Iowa, and educated all over the world. (If you're curious about the formal details, you can check my resume.) Two other long-term homes of mine have been Ypsilanti, Michigan (for a dozen years), and Shizuoka, Japan (for half a dozen, supplemented by a year each in three other Japanese cities: Sendai, Tokyo, and Hamamatsu). Since November 2012 I have lived in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. One of the most profound influences on my life and writing has been the Catholic Worker Movement. I lived for 15 months (1976-78) at St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York, during the last years of Dorothy Day's life, and later for two extended periods at the Des Moines Catholic Worker. I wrote a commentary on the Catholic Worker social program which was published as a little book and received a fairly favorable reception when it was still in print. The text is now made available once again here. Although I am no longer a Roman Catholic, the Worker's radical social vision and strong pacifist and anarchist commitments remain important in my daily walk in the world and in my theological ideas and personal spiritual journey. I write nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Most of my published work is in the first category, with only one item each in the second two. My book Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology, published by Westminster John Knox Press, has remained in print since its first publication in 1995, and is used in seminary curricula and informal discussion groups around the world. My Amazon page is amazon.com/author/richardcleaver. Nowadays I write mostly fiction, with some of my M/M romance fiction appearing under the pen-name Samuel Scott Preston. Although I have had quite a range of jobs over the years, they all, one way or another, come under the heading of language work: public speaking, editing, and translating as well as writing. I have always loved studying languages, ever since I began studying French at about age 7 in a before-school program. The foreign language I am most comfortable in is Japanese, but I know Mandarin, some Italian, and a smattering of several others. I was a classics major in college so I can also handle classical Latin and Greek, and classical Chinese as well. I'm a passionate and knowledgeable opera fan, a retired rugby player, and an openly gay priest, ordained in the Eastern Christian tradition. (My "jurisdiction" is the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America.) Check the other tabs in the sidebar for samples of my writing and information about my editorial services. [Last updated February 7, 2017} |
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