John Macker grew up in Colorado and studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He has published 8 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards finalist), Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge),  Blood in the Mix  (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado’s Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014. In 2019, his poem “Happiness” won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist citation, sponsored by the Telluride Institute. He was a recipient of the first Mad Blood Magazine Literary Arts Award and won the James Ryan Morris Memorial “Tombstone” Award in 2001.  His recent prose and essays on poets and poetics have appeared in Albuquerque’s Malpais Review (where he was contributing editor), Cultural Weekly, as it ought to be magazine, Miriam’s Well, Mad Swirl, Manzano Mountain Review and Lummox Journal. For the last 25 years, he has lived in Northern New Mexico.