Jeff Baker grew up on small farm in a place called Smokey Branch in the mountains of East Tennessee. He has earned degrees from Tennessee Tech and the Iowa Writers¿ Workshop. To pay his way through school, he worked in all the following sorts of factories: windshield, airplane seat, boat seat, refrigeration compressor, air bag, steering column, meat processing, mushroom, chocolate, and toothbrush. His poems have been published widely and have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2010 and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee.