Sophie Cabot Black was raised on a small farm in New England. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in 1980 and her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1984. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, APR, The New Republic and Paris Review, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, ed: Louise Glück (Scribner/Collier Books). In 1988 she received the Grolier Poetry Prize and was subsequently awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 1989 she received the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America and her book, The Misunderstanding of Nature, published by Graywolf Press, received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America for 1994. In 1995 Black was a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. Her second collection, The Descent, also published by Graywolf Press, will be out in September 2004. She currently teaches at Columbia University.