Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, among many other journals. She lives in Montana and is a former Montana Poet Laureate, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.