Brent Goodman was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and earned an MFA in creative writing from Purdue University. He is the author of the chapbooks Trees Are the Slowest Rivers (1998) and Wrong Horoscope, winner of the 1999 Frank O’Hara Award. His full-length poetry collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me (2009), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Poetry as well as the Thom Gunn Award.
 
In The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, Goodman explores the tragic death of his brother and his accompanying grief through lyric meditations on personal spirituality and consciousness itself. Coldfront Magazine reviewer Rick Marlatt commented that Goodman “beckons readers into his balance of desperation and tranquility” through the book’s narrative flashbacks and “poignant and evocative images.”
 
Goodman has twice received Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist Fellowship Awards. He is an assistant editor for the online journal Anti-.