Scott Hightower was born on a working ranch in Central Texas. He attended school at the University of Texas and Columbia University, receiving his MFA in writing from Columbia. He is the author of two previous books of poetry and his poems appear widely in journals such as The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and AGNI. He was the Poet in Residence at Fordham University and currently teaches at New York University. Hightower’s travels to India, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco inform his poetry, as well as his Texas background and life in New York City.

About Part of the Bargain:

"Scott Hightower has Marianne Moore’s scissors and Elizabeth Bishop’s spectacles and he has written a book in the spirit of their adventurous precisions."
—J.D. McClatchy

"The most exciting quality of Hightower’s work is its poetic and paradoxical unifying of emotional and intellectual depth with a marvelous quietness. Its lively incidents and anecdotes are grounded, rooted, in meditative awareness."
—Marie Ponsot

"Scott Hightower is a lyric detective or secret agent in our midst, schooled by Hermes the God of stealth, speed, and journeys. His poems discover deep truths, extracting evidence about the bargains we make with desire and loss in their meticulous perusal of surfaces, things, gestures, and a multitude of canvases. The dead, the living, and the imagined are invited by Hightower to particpate in his music-driven interrogations."
—Catherine Bowman