J. Allyn Rosser was born in Pennsylvania and attended Middlebury College in Vermont as well as the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a doctorate. Her works include Bright Moves (1990), which won the Morse Poetry Prize, and Misery Prefigured (2001), winner of the Crab Orchard Award. In 2007 she was awarded The New Criterion Poetry Prize for a new book of poems entitled Foiled Again, published in the Fall of 2007. Rosser’s poetry has also been published in such periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Ninth Letter. Rosser is a member of the faculty at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.