John Barr grew up in a rural township outside Chicago. An honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he served on Navy destroyers for five years, including three tours to Vietnam. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, and Flaunt Magazine among many periodicals, and in anthologies published by Bloodaxe Books, National Geographic, and the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry. He was president of the Poetry Foundation and publisher of Poetry magazine for its first decade. The Boxer of Quirinal is his fifth book of poems to be published with Red Hen Press, and his tenth to be published over the past thirty years. He currently resides in Greenwich, CT.