Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick was born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and upstate New York. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa.

Beachy-Quick's poetry collections include North True South Bright (2003); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; and This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009). He is also the author of A Whaler's Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Drawing its material from a wide range of sources, Beachy-Quick's poetry is often united by a focused engagement with the fabric of sound and the pattern of echoes. In a review of Mulberry for Jacket Magazine, poet Tim Kahl noted, “[J]uxtaposing and intermingling a strangely patterned nature with an equally strangely patterned domestic life, Beachy-Quick draws a haunting parallel between the realm of nature and the realm of the human.”

Beachy-Quick's work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation. He has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado State University, and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his family.