Simone Muench is the author of five poetry books including Wolf Centos (2014), Orange Crush (2010), and Lampblack & Ash (2005), all from Sarabande Books. Lampblack & Ash won the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Her collaborative sonnets written with Dean Rader have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Zyzzyva, New American Writing, and POOL, among others. Her chapbook Trace (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the fall 2012 Black River Chapbook Competition. She has been the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, a 2013 Yaddo artists’ residency, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, among others. She earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She directs the writing program at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review.  

Photo by Chiyoko Yoshida