B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas and University of Tulsa and now lives with his wife and daughter in Claremont, California. His awards include the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, a NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a California Arts Grant, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, a National Writers’ Union First Prize, and an AWP Anniversary Award. His poetry collections include Local Knowledge, The System of Which the Body Is One Part, and Flight. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review and other journals.

“With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work. . . . Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration.”
—Anthony Hecht

“These remarkably textured, generous, haunting poems articulate the absence and longing that are created by experience and that in turn keep experience alive. Anyone who wishes to understand not only the contemporary American idiom but the reasons for that idiom will have to read B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe.”
—Wyatt Prunty