James Armstrong grew up in Portage, Michigan, and has lived in Boston and Chicago. His poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Gulf Coast, Orion, The Snowy Egret, and elsewhere. He has a Ph.D. in American Literature from Boston University and has taught English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University and in the M.F.A. program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1996 he was awarded the PEN-New England Discovery Prize for poetry, and in 1999 he received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. Armstrong is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.