Kim (Freilich) Dower, originally from New York City, received a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught creative writing. She has published three collections of poetry, all from Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars (2010), which was on the Poetry Foundation’s Contemporary Best Sellers list and described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache”; Slice of Moon (2013), called “unexpected and sublime” by O, The Oprah Magazine; and Last Train to the Missing Planet (2016), “full of worldly, humorous insights into life as it is,” says best-selling author Janet Fitch. Dower’s work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Rattle, and Eclipse. Her poems are included in several anthologies, including Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (2015) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles (2016). Kim teaches poetry in the BA program of Antioch University. She was City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, California from October 2016 to October 2018.