James Plath has taught creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University since 1988. Over the years he has served as a judge for national poetry contests, as a panelist on the Illinois Arts Council and Indiana Arts Commission, as an editor of the award-winning Clockwatch Review: a journal of the arts, and as director of the Hemingway Days Writers Workshop and Conference in Key West. In 1995 he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, and in 2023 he was a Quarry Farm Fellow at Mark Twain's summer residence. The poetry chapbook Everything Shapes Itself to the Sea came out of the first residency, and At Quarry Farm (forthcoming from Kelsay Books) came out of the second. (Author photo credit: Audrey Peterson)