Valentine's sang his first rhymes as a boy working the fields and strolling the dirt roads that ran through his family farm near the Blue Ridge mountains and Shenandoah River in Virginia. In his teens he wrote his first simple poems for a mandatory high school poetry class. In his 20s he wrote most of his poetry, much of it well beyond his years, while modeling for Elite in New York from 1979 to 1981, in Sydney, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Paris and elsewhere from 1981 to 1985, and in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Chicago from 1985 to 1987. Valentine's world travels and experiences with all kinds of people in all kinds of work and play situations add a richness to his caring, feeling words. This is a guy who loves and understands people and it shows in his poems. Thirty distinct works cover the gamut of emotions and subject matter, each achieving sentiment as well as insight.