Wesley Houp was born and raised in High Bridge and Wilmore, Kentucky. He received a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught undergraduate and graduate English courses for over 20 years in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee in addition to serving as Writing Center Director at several universities. For the better part of the last decade, he has worked for Tennessee State Parks. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, and Good River Review. His scholarly work in literacy education and pedagogy has appeared in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, among others. This volume, his first, won the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry in 2024. He currently lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee with his wife, Laura and their daughter and son, Chloe and Henry.
