William Heyen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate degree is from State University of New York at Brockport, where he is a professor of English and poet in residence; his graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature to Germany, he has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His writing has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Harper's, TriQuarterly, Ontario Review, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review, and in more than a hundred anthologies.