James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He is the author of a volume of poems, The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998), and co-translater (with Yu Jung-yul) of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, and Choi Young-mi (Sarabande, 2002). He has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been included in the Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets (University Press of New England, 2000), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2005). He is a graduate of Millsaps College, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Virginia, and the University of Missouri, Columbia, and is currently the director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

About My Psychic:

"James Kimbrell’s My Psychic reads like a splendid anthology—of tones, stances, impressions, occasions—and of one very impressive poet’s range of capabilities and feelings. He’s never been so playful as in these poems, nor so forlorn; never so allusive, nor downright personal. He chisels his stanzas into rock-hard syllabics, into intricate forms and high designs, yet trusts his sense and syntax enough to sing as well in prose. He’s bereft ('O backwards glance! O bad hair / of yesteryear!'), bedazzled ('acacia / and ivy bejeweled with ice'), and bedeviled (as 'an old man living in the knowledge of his death'). For all the phenomenal details of My Psychic, all the range and wreckage of his 'non-refundable life facts,' Kimbrell helps us see into the mysteries and losses that haunt our world—primal, incessant, hidden, and true as 'fog rising from our wordless mouths.'"
—David Baker