Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and the chapbook ____ , don’t you weep. She also co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in the Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Action, Spectacle, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, New England Review, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Salon, and This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, among other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her second full-length poetry collection, The Stuff of Hollywood, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.