Nicky Beer is the author of The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015). She has won a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits Copper Nickel. She is married to the poet Brian Barker. (updated 9/2015)