Leonard Trawick grew up in Alabama, a child of the Great Depression and World War II. He attended the University of the South (Sewanee) and received graduate degrees in English from the University of Chicago and Harvard. In 1969 with his wife and two children he moved to Cleveland, where he taught English and creative writing at Cleveland State University until his retirement in 2000. For 20 years he was principal editor for the CSU Poetry Center, eventually editing some 120 poetry books, many of them the first volumes of young poets who went on to stellar literary careers. He was founding coeditor ofThe Gamut, a general-interest quarterly journal sponsored by CSU—a position he held for 12 years. In addition to two chapbooks and poems in a number of magazines and anthologies, he is author/artist of Beastmorfs, a collection of concrete poetry using various forms of this genre (CSU Poetry Center, 1994). A volume of his selected poems, A 24-Hour Cotillion, was published in 2016 by Dos Madres Press. All of the poems in this reading are included in that collection.