Andrew Epstein was born in 1969 in New York City, and grew up in New Jersey. He attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and is completing his Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, where he is currently a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities. At Columbia, he has taught courses in American literature and composition. His dissertation, "Against Fixity: Twentieth-Century American Poetry and the Pragmatist Strain," is a study of individualism and friendship in postwar American poetry that focuses on Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka. Epstein is the author of a chapbook of poems, A Possible House (Driftwood Press), and his poems have appeared in various journals, including North American Review, The East Village, Verse, Ribot, Lungfull!, Combo, and Brooklyn Review. His critical essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Raritan, Lingua Franca, American Book Review, Boston Review, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and in several books, including The Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets (National Poetry Foundation) and Who's Who in 20th Century World Poetry (Routledge). For the past five years, he has assisted the poet Kenneth Koch in coordinating Columbia's F. W. Dupee Poetry Reading Series, which has featured many contemporary poets, including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and Gary Snyder. He lives in Manhattan with his wife Kara Gross, and will be teaching at Barnard College in the fall.