Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Oklahoma. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University College Dublin, and the University of Michigan, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award for poetry. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and chosen as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1995. Mary Oliver called his work beautiful and disquieting, and Harvard Review notes that his poems are everywhere marked by freshness and originality. He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered - The Book Show, and is a poetry editor of Fence.