Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (Iowa, 2003), winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. He has received writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. “Red Elegy” is part of a new manuscript, Deadbeat. New poems will also appear in The American Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, FIELD, Hotel Amerika, Jacket, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New Hampshire Review, and Pool, among others. He teaches at Emerson College.