About the Author

Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey, and has lived in twelve states and in more than thirty towns and cities, as well as having lived for nearly four years in Santiago, Chile. With his new book, he will have published forty books: fourteen books of poetry, twenty-three novels, one book of short stories, and two books of essays on poetry. He has taught at about a dozen colleges and universities, but most consistently he has taught part-time with the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, having begun in 1977 when the program was at Goddard College. He spent nearly two years working as a general assignment reporter for the Detroit News from 1969–71. From 1995 to 2007, he wrote about thirty feature stories for the San Diego Reader. His first book of poems, Concurring Beasts, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1971 by the Academy of American Poets. His fifth book, Black Dog, Red Dog, was a selection of the National Poetry Series (chosen by Robert Hass) in 1984. Cemetery Nights received the Melville Cain Award from the Poetry Society of America as the best book of poems published in 1986–87 (shared with Margaret Gibson). He has also had poems appear in the Best American Poetry series and has received Pushcart Prizes, as well as having received prizes from the American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines. He has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and three awards from the National Foundation of the Arts. Two of his short stories appeared in Best American Short Stories and two received Pushcart Prizes. He has written many reviews and some articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Times Literary Supplement, and several literary magazines. He has three children and presently lives near the ocean in Westerly, Rhode Island.