Jim Peterson was born in Georgia and grew up in South Carolina. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. are all in English and from the University of South Carolina. He has published four previous full-length collections of poetry—The Man Who Grew Silent (The Bench Press 1989), An Afternoon With K (Holocene 1996), The Owning Stone (Red Hen Press 2000 and 2011), and The Bob and Weave (Red Hen 2006)—and a novel, Paper Crown (Red Hen 2005). Over the years, three chapbooks of his
poems have appeared: Carvings on a Prayer Tree, Greatest Hits 1984-2000, and The Resolution of Eve. His poems have appeared in more than seventy journals including Poetry, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Cave Wall, South Dakota Review, Connecticut
Review, etc., and have won the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the Virginia Arts Commission. His plays have been produced in college and regional theatres. He is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska MFA Program in Creative Writing, and he has recently retired as Coordinator of Creative Writing/Writer in Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. He lives in Lynchburg with his amazing wife Harriet and their charismatic Welsh Corgi, Mama Kilya.