Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell attended Pacific Lutheran University from 1963 to ’66. After service as a military journalist during the Viet Nam war, he received graduate degrees from Portland State University and the University of Massachusetts. He is author of twelve collections of poems, most recently The Grief of a Happy Life (U. Washington Press, 2019), Love’s Last Number and Gaze (both from Milkweed Editions), and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (UW Press, 2010). He has received the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Washington State Book Award, two fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, two from the Artist Trust, and a number of other fellowships and awards, including three Pushcart prizes. His poems, essays, and interviews may be found in many journals and in more than forty-five anthologies. Since 1996 he has lived in Spokane, where he is a member of Eastern Washington University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing faculty. He is married to the artist Barbara Ellen Anderson, and they have a son, Evan, who is also a painter.