Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in Physics from Harvard University. He retired in 2001 after a 25-year career in insurance and investment banking. He has won numerous prizes for his papers in actuarial science, finance, and investments, and received the 2008 Beckley Award from the International Insurance Society for his pioneering work in asset-liability management. His poems have been published in several top literary journals and magazines. He has won the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for Poetry and the New England Poetry Club's Firman Houghton Award. His first collection of poetry, In Confidence, was published by Red Hen Press in 2011, and his second, Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, will appear in 2014. He resides with his wife in Bedford Corners, New York.