BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) – winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) – which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.She has also won a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the Poetry Editor at Tin House Magazine, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University and The Eugene Lang College at the New School.