John Witte grew up in New England, the son of Polish immigrants. After college he worked for many years as a carpenter before moving west to Oregon. Since then his poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in several anthologies, among them The Norton Introduction to Literature. His poems have been translated, set to music, and recorded for the blind. He is the author of Lovng the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008), Disquiet (University of Washington Press, 2015), and, forthcoming, All that Matters Now (Lynx House Press, 2022). He was for thirty years the editor of Northwest Review, as well as of numerous books, including The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he taught Ecopoetry and other subjects at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he lives with his family.