"My pedigree is German-Norwegian," he writes on his Web site. "I was bred for practicality, hard work and a healthy skepticism."

After graduating from St. Olaf, and with Amy's encouragement, in 1992 he went to UAA.

"My wife had always dreamed of going to Alaska," he said. "We were able to combine dreams and kill two birds."

At UAA he studied with poetry professor Tom Sexton and writing professor Ron Spatz and worked on Alaska Quarterly Review. He won the Anchorage Daily News writing contest and was frequently published in the Daily News "We Alaskans" section. Boss said he's looking forward to returning to Alaska and Homer. A poem published in the New Yorker, "One Can Miss Mountains," came about after leaving Alaska and missing the landscape.

"It's going to be wild to come back," he said. "It's one of those places where the landscape stays in your head."

How he became a poet: "I think it was because I wasn't a good enough musician," Boss said.

He studied piano for seven years and tried guitar, but musical instruments never clicked.

"Poetry was a way to make music without having to know an instrument. The English language became my instrument," he said. "It's a complete sonic experience. Every letter has its sounds. Some of them are percussive instruments, some of them are horns, some are strings -- there's an entire orchestra in the English alphabet."

"I think a lot about the sounds of words. My poetry has been called highly musical; that's how I think of it," Boss said. "I bring a sense of composition to my work. There's always a feeling of closure at the end of it. Things resolve. That's not often applied to poetry. That's how I think. My success in poetry the last few years has largely been due to that central quality of my work."

"It's just all about the sounds in the words. The music of it can lift you, the music can move you, the music of it can threaten you."

What he does other than writing: Boss does nonprofit marketing and public relations and recently worked as director of external affairs doing marketing and development for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. He's also the poet laureate for Nina's Caf in St. Paul.

His advice to new writers and poets: "The enterprise of writing is gift based. You can't expect to make any money from it. You have to go with the attitude 'I have been given a gift, and now my job is to give a gift to the world,'" Boss said "If you go at it with the idea of making money -- that's a way to set yourself up for a lot of disappointment."

"For poets, I'm big on telling kids that silence is their best friend if they want to be a writer. That's sort of foreign to students these days because they're so plugged in. They're constantly feeding themselves with sounds. That's good, because you need influences. (But) as writers, we have to protect our right to silence."

"I think where poetry has to begin is an idea. If you're not giving yourself the space to harbor those ideas, to incubate those ideas, I don't know what you're going to write," he said.

Publications: His first poetry collection is "Yellowjacket," published in 2008 by W.W. Norton & Co. He's working on a second volume of poems. His poems have been in The New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner and many other publications. He has done animated poems through www.motionpoems.com. His Web site, www.toddbosspoet.com, includes samples of his poetry with audio clips.

- Compiled by Michael Armstrong, staff writer

Sponsored by the Kachemak Bay Campus, the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference runs June 12-16 at Land's End Resort. Advance registration at the reduced rate of $325 runs through May 1. The conference features workshops, readings and panel presentations in fiction, poetry, nonfiction and the business of writing. Faculty from Alaska and the Lower 48 teach. For registration information, visit www.homer.alaska.edu or call 235-7743. As part of its coverage of the conference, the Homer News presents profiles of some of the visiting faculty.