Robert Lunday was born in 1958 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and raised mainly on Army posts here and there. He received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1980. After finishing a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Houston in 1985, he received a string of writer’s fellowships and residencies: two at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center (1986-87, 1988-89), one at the St. Albans School (Writer in Residence, 1987-88), and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1989-91). After briefly serving as the Writing Committee Coordinator at FAWC, newly married, he lived in Japan for three years, then returned to Houston to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Houston, finishing in 2002. While there, he received a Brazos Bookstore/Academy of American Poets Prize and a Barthelme/Inprint Award for Nonfiction Writing. His first book, Mad Flights, was published in 2002 by Ashland Poetry Press. It was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters First-Book Award. his second book, a prose-poem essay called Gnome, was the first volume published by Black Sun Lit, and was named as one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2017” by Entropy magazine. While teaching English at Houston Community College for the past 22 years, he has also shared work on a small horse farm with his wife, Yukiko Lunday, with whom he also raised one child.