Brenda Shaughnessy’s forthcoming book of poems is The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019.)  Her other collections include So Much Synth and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times’ 100 Notable Book, a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She received a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is currently working on an opera libretto for the composer Paola Prestini, commissioned by The Atlanta Opera for production in the 2020 season. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Verona, New Jersey.