Dennis earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied under Frank Conroy, Ian McEwan, Hilma Wolitzer, Frederick Busch, Edward Hoagland, Rosalyn Drexler, Vance Bourjaily, and Jack Leggett. He was also an assistant to the Iowa Workshop's legendary former director Paul Engle.

Dennis received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a resident writer at Yaddo, and has taught creative writing at The Hotchkiss School.

He has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and later served as the chairman of FAWC's Writing Committee. At the time, the committee included poets Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, and Alan Dugan, and fiction writers Alison Lurie, Denis Johnson, Arturo Vivante, and Grace Paley.

Dennis has had the privilege of knowing many of the most significant American authors of our era: John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, T.C. Boyle, William Kinsella, Robert Stone, Richard Price, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Michael Cunningham, Tama Janowitz, Jayne Anne Phillips and many others.

For more than thirty years, Dennis has been a "reader and advisor" to Sandra Cisneros, MacArthur Award-winning author of the American classic The House on Mango Street and Caramelo.

Dennis has also had a distinguished career in publishing, corporate communications, and new media development.

In the publishing industry, Dennis has worked for Avon Books (at the time, a division of Hearst Corporation) in Manhattan, Sky and Telescope in Cambridge, MA, the Boston Business Journal, and Screen magazine in Chicago.

Dennis worked for seven years in the Public and Government Affairs department of Amoco Corporation (once Standard Oil, currently BP). He was an Internet pioneer, creating the Fortune-20 company's first public website in 1994. He later developed web-based marketing and data systems for several notable high-tech startups including Xylan (now Alcatel-Lucent), Accelerated Networks, and Bill Gross's tech incubator Idealab.

Dennis is a contributor to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's blog. His articles on writing craft include:

• The Future Began on a Tuesday
• Why Five?