James Galvin was raised in northern Colorado. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collection Poems, 1975-1997 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Poet's Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book The Meadow (Holt, 1992) and a novel, Fencing the Sky (Holt, 1999). His honors include a Lila Walace-Reader's Digest Foundation Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a permanent faculty member of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

About X:

"James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry. He also achieves a poetry in which nothing is wasted; what one reviewer called 'a purely American sound.'"
—The Nation

"Galvin [has] the virtues of precise observation and original language... a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make [each] poem an architectural pleasure."
—Tony Hoagland, The Harvard Review