Sandra McPherson is the author of Speech Crush (Gunpowder Press, 2022). She has twenty-one prior collections published, including five with Ecco, three with Wesleyan, two with Illinois, one with Ostrakon, and one, The 5150 Poems, with Nine Mile Books. Newer work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pedestal, Field, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Nine Mile Magazine, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Palette Poetry, Plume, Red Wheelbarrow, Epoch, Willow Springs, Vox Populi, Whitefish, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review. She taught for 23 years at the University of California at Davis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at the University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. She is adopted, and is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist. She is the mother of a daughter on the autism spectrum. As a grad student at the University of Washington, she met Henry Carlile in Elizabeth Bishop’s class and they were married for many years. Her second husband was the late Walter Pavlich (Sensational Nightingales: Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich).