Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of three poetry collections, Interior with Sudden Joy; Human Dark with Sugar, which won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Shaughnessy is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers–Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children.