Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press, and Ticker, which won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press. His fourth book, Late Stage, was published by Jacar Press in 2025. His awards include an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, and elsewhere, He earned his BA from the University of Illinois and his MFA from the University of Alabama. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.