B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife in Claremont, California. His awards includethe National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress, and the California Book Awards Gold Medal (for Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest), and the Kingsley Tufts Award, William Carlos Williams Award, and Pen Center West Award for The Art of the Lathe, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also received the Arthur Rense Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Modern Poetry Award from Sewanee Review for the body of his work, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller/BellagioFellowships and two NEA Fellowships. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review and many other journals and anthologies.