[1] He received a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,[2] and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
[4] It was named Best First Book of 2007 by Coldfront Magazine, and was shortlisted for the Younger Poets Prize, National Poetry Series, and Walt Whitman Award.
[7] It includes the long poem "Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper", which was first printed in the literary quarterly Epiphany[8] and was later excerpted in a 2013 article in The New York Times.
"[8] His debut novel, Florida Palms, about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation, will be published by Simon & Schuster on July 22, 2025.
[11][12] It published The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky, which won the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry.