Fred Marchant is a professor of English and the director of the creative writing program and the poetry center at Suffolk University in Boston. He graduated from Brown University and later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is a longtime teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, as he was himself a conscientious objector within the military during the Vietnam War. He has taught workshops at various sites across the country, including The Frost Place (Franconia, NH), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and the Veterans Writing Group (Sebastopol, CA). In 2009 Marchant was co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.”