Reginald Shepherd received his B.A. from Bennington College in 1988 and M.F.A. degrees from Brown University and University of Iowa. The University of Pittsburg Press published his first book, Some Are Drowning, in 1994 as winner of the 1993 AWP Award Series in Poetry. Pittsburgh published his second book, Angel, Interrupted, in 1996; it was a finalist for a 1997 Lambda Literary Award. His chapbook, This History of His Body, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999.

Shepherd is the recipient of a 1993 "Discovery" / The Nation Award, a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994-1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 1998 Illinois Arts Council poetry fellowship, and a 2000 Saltonstall Foundation poetry grant. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review, as well as in the 1995, 1996, 2000, and 2002 editions of The Best American Poetry.

About Otherhood:

"Brilliant and elegiac....A writer always concious of the shadowy borders where myth and history—his own and Western civilization's—mingle. Those borders, classical and contemporary, are the true location of Shepherd's poems, and his newest work crosses and recrosses them, excavates their sites, finds the evidence of the poem at every stratum."
—Marilyn Hacker

"Shepherd continues the mining—making mine—of classical texts and textures which has been for so long his forte....No poet of his generation brings more intelligence, passion, wit, and necessary madness to poetry....The most important book yet by this important poet."
—Bin Ramke

"True poets give gifts. Reginald Shepherd gives his readers the interest of the world....Shepherd's book is a Song of Songs....A searching back all the way to the place where song comes from."
—Allen Grossman