Evan Lavender-Smith was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and attended the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of From Old Notebooks (Dzanc Books, 2013) and Avatar (Six Gallery Press, 2011). His writing has been published by Arts & Letters, BOMB, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Glimmer Train, Harvard Review, Hobart, New England Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, The White Review and many other magazines and websites. He is the founding editor of Noemi Press and an assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Virginia Tech.