John Shoptaw grew up in the drained Mississippi River floodplain of "Swampeast" Missouri. He was educated at Southeast Missouri State College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and Harvard University. After some years teaching on the east coast, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department. He is the author of On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry, the libretto for Eric Sawyer's opera Our American Cousin (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and a number of essays on poetry and poetics, including "Why Ecopoetry?" (Poetry). His poems have appeared in varous venues, including Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry. His first poetry collection, Times Beach (2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in Poetry.