C. G. Hanzlicek was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1942. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966. He is the author of eight books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry), Calling the Dead, A Dozen for Leah, When There Are No Secrets, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, Against Dreaming, and, most recently, The Cave: Selected and New Poems, which appeared in 2001 from University of Pittsburgh Press. He has translated Native American Songs, A Bird’s Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. His work has appeared in over a dozen anthologies and in many journals, including Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, North American Review, Hudson Review, and Iowa Review. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for 35 years and was for most of those years the Director of the Creative Writing Program.