Thomas Lux (1946–2017) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and became one of the most beloved and widely taught American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He received his MFA from Emerson College. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for more than thirty years before moving to Georgia Tech, where he was the Bourne Professor of Poetry. His collections include Memory's Handgrenade (1972), Half Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), and New and Selected Poems 1975–1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). He received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was known for his surreal wit and accessibility.