Frank Paino was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1960. He holds a B.A. in English from Baldwin-Wallace College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. His first book of poetry, The Rapture of Matter, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1991. Paino's work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The American Voice, Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West. He has won a number of awards including the Missouri Review’s Tom McAfee Discovery Feature, a Pushcart Prize, and the 1992 Cleveland Arts Prize for poetry.

“Whether transporting the reader back to an early nineteenth-century autopsy or jack-hammering the most harrowing anti-occasional poem I’ve ever encountered out of his childhood, Frank Paino possesses a riveting narrative gift and a hell-bent, unprecedented, Gatling gun ear.  Out of Eden is elegiac, erotic, and brilliantly imagined.  No matter what corner of human history he illuminates, he transforms it into an almost unbearable beauty.” – Roger Weingarten

“Seductive, edgy, gothic and sublime, these poems haunt the body as much as the soul. Paino’s Out of Eden quickens with the articulation of votive flames. The shadows they cast become, in his skilled hands, earthly pietas of a new transfiguring gospel which declares, ‘We will never turn back toward any paradise where there is no fire and we have nothing, nothing to lose.’ Paino makes us feel how marvelously everything’s at stake in a world where our desire to know is both tragic and redemptive.” – Beckian Fritz Goldberg