Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of four books of poetry, including So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar—winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award—and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Book Review “100 Notable Books of 2013.” She is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She lives in New Jersey.