James Crews was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Best New Poets 2006 and 2009, Columbia, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. He is the author of three chapbooks: Bending the Knot (Gertrude Press Prize, 2009); One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes (Parallel Press, 2009) and What Has Not Yet Left (Copperdome Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2010). His manuscript, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. He has worked as a salesman of bespoke wallpaper, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and an English teacher in rural Oregon. He has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now working on a PhD in Lincoln, Nebraska—which is actually a lot cooler than most people think.