Allison Titus received her MFA in fiction from VCU in 2003 and her MFA in poetry from Vermont College in 2005. Her first full-length book of poems, Sum of Every Lost Ship, was published by CSU Press in 2009. Her chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, won the 2006 Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Prize. Titus is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2011. Recently, her poems have appeared in absent magazine, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, and Octopus Magazine. One of her stories has also appeared in Ninth Letter.