Thomas Heise was born in northern Michigan, but raised in Southern Florida. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University, where he also taught as a Lecturer. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Ploughshares, Slope, Verse, Modern Fiction Studies, and in the BioCritique series. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the University of California, New York University, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2004, he received the Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he is writing a second book of poetry and finishing a study on twentieth-century urban American culture and literature.