Fred Peterson grew up And rice farms throughout South East Arkansas in the 1940s and 1950s, the son of a sharecropper and the seventh of eight children is for three takes one on a journey with the family Rich and log a teacher early in his career his life path that came from Arkansas to St. Louis and if Pittsburger just left for the last 30 years he is past president of Pittsburgh Poetry Society, whose members he credits for giving him the drive to put this, his first book, together