Gary Copeland Lilley is originally from Sandy Cross, North Carolina, and was a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., where he was a founding member of the Black Rooster Collective. He received the D.C. Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry in 1996 and again in 2000, and he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2002. The Subsequent Blues is his first book. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.