Nicky Beer's book of poems, The Diminishing House, is published by Carnegie Mellon University Press (2010). She has received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Discovery/The Nation award. She has degrees from Yale University, the University of Houston, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her poems, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have been published in Best American Poetry 2007, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, The Nation, Nerve, New Orleans Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel, and she is married to the poet Brian Barker.