Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers. In 2001 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Stanford University, California College of the Arts, The George Washington University, and Lynchburg College. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.