Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Boy with Thorn, his debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. Currently he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.