PETER COOLEY was born and educated in the Midwest and has lived over half of his life in New Orleans, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. The former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, he received the Marble Faun Award in Poetry from the Faulkner Society and an Atlas Grant from the state of Louisiana. He has published nine previous books, eight of them from Carnegie Mellon. Married and the father of three children, he has published poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic and a number of anthologies.