Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, David Wojahn won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for his first collection, Icehouse Lights (Yale University Press, 1982), selected by Richard Hugo. His later collections include Mystery Train (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), built around a sequence of sonnets on rock and roll history; Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 (Pittsburgh, 2006); and World Tree (Pittsburgh, 2011), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.