Eric Ekstrand was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1984 and received a BA in English Literature from Wake Forest University in 2007. He has an MFA from the University of Houston where he held an Inprint / Brown Foundation Fellowship.  He was also awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2009.  He taught writing and literature at UH as well as a writer for Writers in the Schools, Houston.  He is a former poetry editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts as well as the Graduate Student Advisor for Glass Mountain, an undergraduate literary journal at UH.  In 2009, along with the staff of Glass Mountain, he helped to organize the first annual boldface Writers Conference, a national conference for emerging writers.  He currently teaches writing at Wake Forest University in North Carolina where he lives with his husband Danny.  His poems have appeared in the Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, New South, jubilat, Poetry and elsewhere.