Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of The Galleons, as well as three previous collections of poems: The Darker Fall; Want; which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 GrubStreet National Book Prize in Poetry; and Chord. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, PEN Open Book Award, and Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Stanford University. He is the poetry editor for New England Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.