Forrest Hamer is the author of Call & Response (Alice James, 1995), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award, and Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), which received the Northern California Book Award. He is an Oakland, California, psychologist and affiliate member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. His poetry has appeared in many journals, and has been anthologized in Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, Blues Poems, and the 1994 and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the California Arts Council, and he has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops.