Rupert Loydell was born in London in 1960. He founded Stride magazine in 1982, shortly before starting his degree in creative writing and painting, and just before founding Stride Books (and Stride Cassettes). Between then and spring 2008 he published several hundred titles in Stride's wide-ranging list of poetry, fiction, and critical texts; the magazine continues online. Loydell has also edited numerous books, including How the Net Is Gripped: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1992), A Curious Architecture: A Selection of Contemporary Prose Poems (1996), My Kind of Angel: i.m. William Burroughs (1998), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos. He has also produced several artist's books. In addition to editing Stride, he is currently Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, is a widely exhibited painter of small abstract paintings, and a widely anthologised and published poet. Ballads of the Alone is his fifth collection of poems from Shearsman Books.