Peter Makuck is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University, and he was the founder and editor of Tar River Poetry from 1978 to 2006. His Long Lens: New & Selected Poems, released in 2010, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has published two collections of short stories, Breaking and Entering and Costly Habits; the latter was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was listed by The Dictionary of Literary Biography in the "Top Ten Story Collections of 2002." His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Hudson Review, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, the North American Review, the Gettysburg Review, and The Nation.