Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She holds MFA degrees from the Universities of Houston and Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Her first collection of poetry, World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001) won the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the 2002 Kate Tufts Discover Award. It was described by Publishers Weekly as a “taut, defiant, confessional collection” and by Ploughshares as a “spectacular debut.” Along with the poet Michael Dumanis, she co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and is an associate professor in English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.