Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Rumpus. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.