Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and was educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in English. His first book of poems, The Afterlife of Objects, appeared in 2002. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is the author of One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award, and teaches at Amherst and Wellesley colleges. He lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts.