Nicky Beer is the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon 2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.