Bob Hicok teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, and his poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, Paris Review, and the New Yorker. He is the author of The Legend of Light, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and Animal Soul, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

About Insomnia Diary:

"Hicok is funny as hell, in Blake's sense of the infernal: irreverent, anarchic, undeceived. His bracing ill humor is a vehicle for outrage, longing, tenderness, and a sly cynicism that is the necessary counterbalance to a tenacious sense of hope. He is one of our premiere anatomists of contemporary American life, and a wildly refreshing, necessary poet."
—Mark Doty

"[Hicok] writes with an honest man's happy discontent. . . . His poems stand on that inconvenient ground where the absurd and romantic visions battle for the voice and transmit the full joyful and afflicted human creature. He is one of the finest poets to have emerged in the last ten years."
—Rodney Jones

"The sophisticated jester of these soliloquies, dumbfounded by the simplicity and complexity of life, is on a hang glider headed straight for Olympus."
—Mary Ruefle