Michael Shewmaker is the author of Leviathan (2023) and Penumbra (2017), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Yale Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Texas Tech University. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.