Neil Aitken

Neil Aitken is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: The Lost Country of Sight, which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize, and Babbage's Dream, a semi-finalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize. His chapbook, Leviathan, won the 2017 Elgin Prize for Sci Fi Poetry Chapbook. His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and elsewhere. A proud Kundiman fellow, he is also the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, the administrator of Have Book Will Travel, an online resource for authors and reading series, and the co-director of De-Canon, a reading library and online resource that showcases the work of writers of color.

Of Chinese, English, and Scottish ancestry, he has lived in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and various parts of the western United States and Canada and has worked a variety of jobs from farm laborer to computer games programmer. His collaborative translations of contemporary Chinese poetry appear in The Book of Cranes: Selected Poems of Zang Di; New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012; and The River Merchant's Wife: Selected Poems of Ming Di. He holds both a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside.

Visit him online at www.neil-aitken.com