James Baker Hall is currently Poet Laureate of Kentucky. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside, and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

James Baker Hall's first novel, Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings, will be reprinted by University Press of Kentucky in September 2002.