Ron Slate lives in Milton, Massachusetts and is currently the chief operating officer of a biotech start-up firm. Previously, he spent more than twenty years in corporate communications. He earned a Master’s degree in creative writing from Stanford in 1973 and also studied at the University of Wisconsin. From 1973-1988 he edited The Chowder Review. His poetry was widely published in journals like Antaeus, The Georgia Review, and Poetry Northwest, but he virtually stopped writing for twenty years. In 2001, he started writing poetry again. The result was The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Bakeless Prize. Subsequently, the book has been nominated for best book of poetry of 2005 by the National Book Critics Circle and for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets and won the Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry.  

Photo by George Disario