Peter Makuck is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University where he has edited Tar River Poetry since 1978. He has published three collections of poetry including Where We Live (BOA Editions, 1982), The Sunken Lightship (BOA Editions, 1990), and Against Distnace (BOA Editions, 1997), three poetry chapbooks, two collections of short stories, and co-edited a book of essays, An Open World, on the Welsh poet Leslie Norris. His most recent book of short stories, Costly Habits (University of Missouri Press, 2002), was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1988 he was the recipient of the Brockman Award, given annually for the best collection of poetry by a North Carolinian, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. His essays, reviews, stories, and poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Poetry, and The Laurel Review. With his wife Phyllis, he lives on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's barrier islands.

About Off-Season in the Promised Land:

"In Off-Season in the Promised Land, Peter Makuck watches for 'what comes into view.' These are poems that accept the conditions of our lives—aging, misfortune, sickness, grief—and yet try to guide us to those moments of arrival when we are taken by a wakeful attentiveness. In an age that often overvalues eccentricties of voice and style, Peter Makuck's work has taken on the haunting quietude of those huge reclining Buddhas who have 'seen everything and accept."
—Robert Cording

"In free-soaring lyrics, Peter Makuck casts deft nets for the moments that are nearly impossible to name, that disappear the way the fox in one poem vanishes 'like smoke into smoke.' Moving with reverence and precision, the poet captures both 'the sea's unkeepable blue' and the 'light that is always available.'Makuck is a master of praise, meditation and mystery. This is his wisest and most beautiful collection"
—Betty Adcock