Mark Jarman, a native of Kentucky, is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A graduate of the University of California-Santa Cruz and the University of Iowa, he is the author of seven books of poetry: North Sea (1978), The Rote Walker (1981), Far and Away (1985), The Black Riviera (1990), Iris (1992), Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997), and Unholy Sonnets (2000). With David Mason, he has edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996). He has written two books of essays, The Secret of Poetry (2001) and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry (2002).

Jarman has been awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry, National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets’ Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.  

Photo by Rebecca Walk