Catherine Staples grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, spending summers in Virginia and on Cape Cod. She is the author of The Rattling Window (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) which won the McGovern Prize.  Her poems and reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Prime Number, and Quarterly West among other magazines. In 2010 her sestina, “Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew,” won the New England Poetry Club’s Boyle/Farber award and  in 2011 judge Carl Dennis chose her poem “Red Rover” for the Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize. Her chapbook Never a Note Forfeit (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011) was selected by Betsy Sholl for the Keystone Prize. She teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University.