Edward Mayes’s books of poetry include First Language (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press), To Remain (Gesù Award), Magnetism (San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award), Works and Days (Associated Writing Programs Award), Speed of Life, and Bodysong. He has published over 400 poems, stories, and essays in journals such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Poetry. He has also received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award and Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, been a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He has given poetry readings at Stanford University, Brown University, San Francisco State Poetry Center, University of California, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. For many years he was Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Clara University. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina and Cortona, Italy, with the writer Frances Mayes.