Carol Potter currently lives in Cathedral City and teaches at Los Angeles City College, Santa Monica College, and in the MFA low residency program at Antioch University. Her third book of poems, A Short History of Pets, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Award in 1999, and the Balcones Award. Other prizes include a Pushcart Prize, the New Letters Award for Poetry, and the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from the Missouri Review. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Field, the Iowa Review, the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Miscellany, The Journal, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Pushcart Prize xxvi, Best of the Small Presses, and many others. Other awards and honors include residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, Villa Montalvo, Centrum, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and at the Cummington Community of the Arts. Her first two books of poems, Before We were Born (1990) and Upside Down in the Dark (1995), were published by Alice James Books.