Rob Schlegel is the author of the The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing, 2009), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014) which won the Grub Street National Book Prize. Of January Machine, Cathy Park Hong writes, "...part discursive meditation and part stirring lyric, these poems search for an utterance that can be wakeful to despair and fear, an utterance that can sing through, yet simultaneously net, America's distraction with the spectacle, and embody what Gertrude Stein calls 'open feeling,' a state of slowed, empathic receptivity." Schlegel's  poems have appeared in Boston Review,The Iowa Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Washington State where he coedits The Catenary Press.