When James Armstrong was 13 years old, his family moved to Michigan from southern Indiana. They decided to drive up to the U.P. to take a look at the great inland sea at the top of the map. That was the beginning of a long love affair with Lake Superior.

Armstrong’s poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Gulf Coast, Orion, The Snowy Egret, The New York Times Book Review, and Shade. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Boston University and has taught English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University and in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His book of poems, Monument in a Summer Hat, was published in 1999 by New Issues Press. A fine-arts press edition of his work on Lake Superior, Purl, was published in May 2003 by Syphon Press. Armstrong received the PEN-New England Discovery Prize for poetry in 1996, and he has been awarded both an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in poetry. He was an artist in residence at Isle Royale in 1994. For the past five years Armstrong has been a professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.