Tracy Philpot lives just outside Seldovia, Alaska, a remote community accessable only by plane or boat, in a little cabin with her husband, son, and animals. She received her Ph.D. and MA from the University of Denver, and now works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Her first book, Incorrect Distances, was published by the University of Georgia Press.

About Distance From Birth:

"Tracy Philpot's Distance From Birth possesses an original fervor that arises from the injured earth out of the mouth. Here is a generous, whole-fleshed poetic idiom, stringent yet wild, blasted yet flexible enough to mark threat and scar as well as capture the sports of the heart. In the often thorned convolutions of these poems, the music may seem at first broken with emotion, but I think it is rather the lovingly intact wording for a broken world. What initially may appear as stark and severe is not a resistence but an acceptance, an allowing through, a faithfulness that may be torn of hope but is never without the refracting beauties of frost, of the glimpse."
—Dean Young

"Tracy Philpot's poems are as close, intimate and, at times, as startlingly strange as one's own hand. Intimate and tender, the poems keep speaking into the open hesitancies they create with an uncommon courageousness of heart, and in an evolving ethics of what it might mean to be human: "you can't for years write god/and then out of desperation/write God because of what the earth loses."
—Gillian Conoley

"She is our most unmediated poet, ravening in her flesh for the flesh of every moment which, after all, is an animal fed by heart."
—Donald Revell