Randy Koch worked at a stockyard and a nursing home for ten years before earning an MA in fiction writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato and an MFA in poetry writing at the University of Wyoming. He taught community college and university courses in composition and creative writing in Minnesota, Texas, and Pennsylvania and volunteered as a creative writing instructor at the federal prison in Rochester, MN. He’s the author of two collections of poems, Composing Ourselves (Fithian Press, 2002) and This Splintered Horse (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and is a longtime columnist for LareDOS: A Journal of the Borderlands. His poems have appeared in Revista Interamericana, Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe, J Journal, Measure, Passages North, The Texas Observer, Chiricú Journal, and many others. His manuscript of dramatic monologues about the Spanish conquest of the Americas, titled Against the Risen Flesh, was short-listed for the Alternating Current Press Electric Book Award and is scheduled for publication in 2025-2026.