Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College and is now the Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature 1998 and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her books include A Tonalist (2010), A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 (2007), Ultraviolet (2006), Self-Destruction (2005), Nude Memoir (2000), The Case (1998), Spicer’s City (1998), Symmetry (1996), L’Archiviste (1991), Like Roads (1990), and Rondeaux (1990).