Born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, Dacey was educated by Incarnate Word nuns and Jesuit priests for sixteen years. He holds Master's degrees from Stanford U. and U. of Iowa, where he attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His travels have taken him to Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Vietnam, and many countries in western Europe and the British Isles. He's the proud father of three children, 32, 29, and 26. His seventh full-length book is The Deathbed Playboy (1999). Previous books include The Boy Under the Bed (Johns Hopkins, 1981), Gerard Manley Hopkins Meets Walt Whitman in Heaven and Other Poems (Penmaen, 1982), The Man With Red Suspenders (Milkweed Editions, 1986), Night Shift at the Crucifix Factory (Iowa, 1991), and The Paramour of the Moving Air (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1999). He co-edited, with David Jauss, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (HarperCollins, 1986). Since 1967, he's published over a thousand poems in literary periodicals and appeared in numerous anthologies. His fellowships and awards include NEA (twice), Fulbright, Pushcart (three times), and Discovery (New York YM-YWHA Poetry Center). Dacey, in order to have more time to write, now teaches only one semester a year at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. He lives in the countryside outside Lynd.