Stephen Ackerman’s debut poetry collection, Late Life, won the 2020 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2022. His poems have appeared in many print and online publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2010, Boulevard, Columbia Review, Harper’s Magazine, Jewish Quarterly, The Manhattan Review, Mudfish, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Daily, Red Wheelbarrow, Salamander, Seneca Review, upstreet, Verse Daily and Western Humanities Review. He worked as an attorney in the Legal Counsel Division of the New York City Law Department for over thirty years, and retired in 2019. He earned a B.A. from Columbia University, where he studied with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro; an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University (The Writing Seminars), where he studied with David St. John; and a J.D. from Boston University. While at BU, he took a course in the Creative Writing Program with Linda Gregerson. He was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, lived in Brooklyn for many years, and now lives in Poughquag, New York.