Ed Roberson’s eleven previous books of poetry include Asked What Has Changed (2021) and the Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist and Kingsley-Tufts Award runner-up To See the Earth before the End of the World (2010), both from Wesleyan University Press. A former Special Programs administrator at Rutgers University’s Cook Campus, Roberson has lived in Chicago since 2004 and is an emeritus professor in Northwestern University’s MFA creative writing program. He has also held posts at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cave Canem retreat for Black writers. His honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and the African American Literature and Culture Association’s Stephen Henderson Critics Award. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson has worked as a limnologist (assisting research on inland and coastal freshwater systems in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and in Bermuda), as a diver for the Pittsburgh Aquazoo, in an advertising graphics agency, and in the Pittsburgh steel mills. As an expedition member of the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh, he climbed mountains in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes. In addition to the motorcycle trip across the United States on which this book is based, Roberson’s travels include sojourns in Mexico, West Africa, and the Caribbean.