Rick Mulkey is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared in a variety of periodicals such as Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review, and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. He has received a Hawthornden Fellowship and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Award, among others. Mulkey has taught at universities and writing workshops in the United States and Europe, and he currently directs the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Converse College.