Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa and raised in Southern California. She is the author of four previous poetry collections, including So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar—winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award—and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2013. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She lives in New Jersey.