Rob Halpern is the author of several books of poems: Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), as well as several chapbooks, including Weak Link (Slack Buddha 2009) and Imaginary Politics (TapRoot Editions 2008). His most recent project, Music for Porn, is a new publication from Nightboat Books, 2012. With Taylor Brady, he also co-authored the book length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus/Finch 2007), soon to be reissued by Displaced Press in an expanded edition.

Halpern received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2006), where he wrote a dissertation on the prehistory of literary modernism in nineteenth-century France. He's held faculty positions at Bard College, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco University. He's also an active participant in the Nonsite Collective, whose commitment to self-organized pedagogy and collaboration across disciplines models some of the outreach and community work we seek to initiate in our program. He is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan University.