photo: Allen Nomura

Cyrus Cassells was born in 1957 in Dover, Delaware, and received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1979. He is the author of Beautiful Signor (Copper Canyon Press, 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. Cyrus Cassells lives in San Francisco.