Photo: Allen Nomura

In 1957 Cyrus Cassels was born in Dover, Delaware. He grew up in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, California. He began writing poetry in high school. Cassels received a BA from Stanford University in 1979.

He is the author of More Than Peace and Cypresses (Copper Canyon Press, 2004);Beautiful Signor (1997), which won the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (1994), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor (1982), which was a National Poetry Series selection.

Cassells is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher.

He teaches poetry at the Texas State University-San Marcos for the MFA in writing program. He lives in Austin, Texas.