Originally from Sandy Cross, North Carolina and now living in Chicago, GARY COPELAND LILLEY was a long-time resident of Washington, D. C., where he was a founding member of The Black Rooster Collective. He received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry in 2000 and 1996. His stories and poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The African American Review, Drum Voice, The New Orleans Review, Eighty-eight, Gargoyle, Cabin Fever, and Beyond the Frontier. He earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 2002 The Subsequent Blues is his first collection of poems.