Michael Lind has been described by Rolling Stone magazine as "that rarest of figures: an intellectual with name recognition." Now the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (2002); Bluebonnet Girl (2004), a children's book in verse that won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children's literature; and a narrative poem, The Alamo (1997), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. Parallel Lives is his first collection of verse.

Lind's themes range from geopolitical issues, interpersonal relationships, art, nature and the American landscape, to the nature of poetry itself. Thomas Disch says of Lind, "To read his spare and elegant poems is to be privy to the councils of the unacknowledged legislators of our own day and age."