Neil Shepard lives half the year in Johnson, Vermont, and half in New York City. He is an award-winning poet who has published nine books of poetry, most recently, The Book of Failures (Madville Publishing, January 2024). His previous books include How It Is: Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018) and Vermont Poets and Their Craft (Editor, Green Writers Press, 2019). He has published essays, book reviews, interviews, and poems in numerous literary magazines, among them, AWP Chronicle, Boulevard, Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. He taught for many years in the BFA writing program at Johnson State College in Vermont, as well as in the MFA writing program at Wilkes University (PA). He founded and directed for eight years the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center, and he edited for a quarter-century the literary magazine Green Mountains Review. Recently, he founded the online magazine Plant-Human Quarterly and serves as its editor-in-chief. Shepard has been a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. He has served as a visiting writer and workshop leader at several institutions, among them, Poets House (NYC), Chautauqua Writers Institute (NY), Ossabaw Island Writers Retreat (GA), and the Frost Place (NH). Outside the literary realm, he is a founding member of the poetry and jazz ensemble, PoJazz.