Theodore Zachary Cotler was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1981 and raised in Marin County, California. Cotler earned a BA in English from Cornell University in 2003 and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2008. His first book of poems is House with a Dark Sky Roof (2011). His poems have recently appeared in Poetry, the Wolf, the Frogmore Papers, the Paris Review, Narrative, Republic of Letters, and other journals in the US and UK. In 2006, he received the Amy Clampitt Residency Award. He is a founding editor of The Winter Anthology. He has finished writing Ghost at the Loom, a novel about poets, children, high-speed media, and the decline of imagination.