Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, painter, and author, most recently of the award-winning poetry collection Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press) and the 2022 coedited award-winning anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. His co-authored volume Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare (Tupelo, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, and many others. It features 150 recipes; a plenitude of culinary essays and poems by Massimilla; a wide-ranging anthology of works by other poets; a guide to healthy, sustainable eating; and 200 photographs, including many of his own. His collection The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU, 2013), was a selection of the Stephen F. Austin University Press Poetry Prize competition. His book Forty Floors From Yesterday (CUNY, 2002) received the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Bordighera Poetry Prize. His sonnet sequence Later on Aiaia (Grolier, 2001) won the Grolier Poetry Prize;  and his collection Almost a Second Thought was runner-up for the Salmon national Poetry Book Award, selected by the poet and Paris Review editor X.J. Kennedy. Other honors include a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; an Academy of American Poets Prize; multiple Pushcart Prize nominations; and a Der-Hovanessian translation award citation. Massimilla has also translated book-length works by Pablo Neruda and other authors. Recent poetry publications include AGNI, The American Literary Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Chelsea, Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Provincetown Arts magazine, Quarterly West, The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Verse Daily, and anthologies such as the recently released Greening the Earth (Penguin Random House, 2023) and New Hungers for Old: One Hundred Years of Italian American Poetry. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University. He has taught or teaches writing, classics, modernist literature, philosophy, and other subjects at Columbia University, SVA, Barnard College, and The New School. The former co-manager of a gallery, he is also an artist whose paintings have been exhibited in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.