Melissa Kwasny is the author of six books of poetry, including Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press 2017), Pictograph (Milkweed Editions 2015), and Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed Editions 2009). Her second book Thistle won the Idaho Prize in 2006 and was published by Lost Horse Press. She is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision and the editor of two anthologies: Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 and, along with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Kenyon Review, Willow Springs, Field, Basalt, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Journal, and many others. Kwasny lives in the Elkhorn Mountains outside Jefferson City, Montana.