Charles Butterfield holds graduate degrees in biology-teaching (American University) and English (Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English). During his thirty-eight-year career teaching science, he published articles in the journals of the National Association of Biology Teachers and the American Chemical Society. His textbook, Values and Biology, was published by J. Weston Walsh in 1983.

Butterfield also taught English at Nathaniel Hawthorne College and Southern Vermont College. His poems have appeared in small-press journals and in two books of poetry, Another Light and Field Notes.