JOEL BROUWER's first book of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), won the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He has received fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. HIs poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, The Progressive, Southwest Review, and other publications. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama.