Tom Hansen's first collection Falling to Earth was selected from over 900 manuscripts by judge Molly Peacock as winner of BOA's 4th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He taught writing and literature classes for thirty-five years at Northern State University in Aberdeen SD, before retiring to the Black Hills, where he lives on ten acres of hilly, rocky, ponderosa-covered land with his wife, their husky, an indeterminate number of deer and wild turkeys and, now and then, a vagrant mountain lion. Over the past quarter century, his poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Bitter Oleander, The Explicator, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, New York Quarterly, Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Weber Studies, and others.

About Falling to Earth:

"A bemused, stoop-shouldered figure who is more than a mere speaker — let's call him a protagonist — stalks the poems of Falling to Earth. With candor and an almost grandiose simplicity, Hansen describes the limitations of his middle-aged body and, in so doing, the limitations of his enterprise in mid-life: the gracelessness of survival. Falling to Earth is the journey of a vibrant soul refreshing itself poem by poem."
—Molly Peacock