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This is going to leave a lot out, but maybe it will leave in enough to be useful. Steven W. Baker was born in a small town in Indiana, sometime near the dawn of the postmodern era and the end of whatever came before.
After finding an old, junked radio in the trash, he started his first electronics company during high school. He graduated from Purdue University with a BA in English and from Indiana University with an MA in English.
He served in the US Army during Vietnam, but, because of a football injury, remained stateside working as an Army radio station DJ. He was also the editor of an underground, anti-war newspaper, The Spread Eagle. His attention during these university and military years turned more and more to writing, and he contributed to many of the publications of that era - poetry, fiction, and political writings.
Returning to civilian life, he got married, taught high school English for eight years, and became the father of three beatiful children. Finally, he went back to work in engineering, serving as Chief Electrical Engineer at Land O'Frost, Inc., near Chicago, for ten years. Then he started his second company, which designed and implemented automation control systems for factories all over the world. He lived and worked in the US, Canada, Mexico, China, Indonesia, the UK, and Puerto Rico. During these years, he also found time to sail extensively in the Caribbean and, for some years, co-owned a bar, Machi's, on the island of St. Lucia.
This traveling took a toll on his marriage, but in 2004, he met and married his second wife. They split their time between living in Bolivia and the US for the next several years. He retired from engineering in 2007. For several years, the couple owned and operated a restaurant in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Finally, they sold the restaurant and returned to the US to live in Gainesville, Florida, near his daughters and his wife's son. Starting about 1998, writing took center stage more and more in his life, as he concentrated again on writing poetry, fiction, political and travel journalism, and opinion pieces.
The focus of his poetry continues to be the human interior - our reactions to what we experience. The exterior world can be described by science, philosophy, and the arts, but what that exterior produces inside human beings is perhaps best described using poetry.
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