Tom has been a lifelong student of language and mystery. After graduating from Georgetown, he earned a Master’s degree in English from the University of Oxford and later a PhD from Harvard, where he was appointed Lecturer in History and Literature and won a teaching award and a Mellon Fellowship. For five years Tom wrote a monthly column in America magazine on the interplay between intellectual and spiritual life which formed the basis of a book entitled, From This Clay. Other books include Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism. He teaches courses on urban consciousness, nineteenth-century poetry, Dickens, Modernism, political speech, borders, wilderness and death. He and his wife divide their time between Minneapolis and Tucson.