Cody Walker was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1967. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin, an MFA from the University of Arkansas, and a PhD from the University of Washington. He received the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah in 2003 and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Washington in 2005. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. As well as his Waywiser poetry collections, Walker is the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Parnassus, Slate, Poetry Northwest, The Hecht Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry (2007 and 2015); and his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he teaches English at the University of Michigan.