Atsuro Riley grew up in South Carolina and lives in California. His heavily stressed, percussive, consonant-rich, free-verse poems conjure up the elemental images of the lives of people inhabiting a specific, acutely portrayed landscape. His poems are dense with impressions, voices, and glimpses of people who have experienced the Vietnam War, rural life, and the South. Though grounded in a world that seems unmistakably North American, the poems’ rich Anglo-Saxon textures are reminiscent of the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Basil Bunting.

Riley's work has been published in Poetry, the Threepenny Review, and The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets (2007), and has been featured on Poetry Daily. He has received a Pushcart Prize and the J. Howard and M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine. His first book, Romey's Order (2010), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and a Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress.