Jeffrey Bean was raised in Bloomington, Indiana. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Guitar Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Alabama. From 2006-2008, he served as the Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville. Currently, he lives with his wife Jessica and daughter Olivia in Mount Pleasant, MI, where he is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. His first full length collection, Diminished Fifth, was published by David Robert Books in 2009, and his chapbook, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, won the 2013 Vern Cowles/Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in 2014. His poems have been featured on the NPR program The Writer's Almanac and in Garrison Keillor's anthology Good Poems, American Places. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in the journals FIELD, Slate.com, Southern Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, and River Styx, among others.