John Balaban is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. In addition to writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Balaban is poet in residence and professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.