J. Todd Hawkins was born and bred in Fort Worth, Texas. And, when it comes down to it, that has a lot to do with a lot of his writing. Billed as "Where the West Begins," Fort Worth rests on a borderland, a cultural crossroads, a liminal place where different narratives interweave. As with most places, some of these narratives were more prominent than others. There was the public image put out by civic boosters-cowboys, oil, high culture-but there was also a subversive, underground scene just as important to the functioning of the city. So Hawkins learned to listen for the quiet voices. And he grew up exploring the Fort's honky tonks as well as its punk rock clubs, its world-class art museums and its abandoned graffiti-splattered meat-packing plants. In school, he learned about its heralded native sons, while in friends' backyards, he learned about the gangsters who once prowled Jacksboro Highway. This collection reflects those dichotomies, revealing the softness of a hard people, the beauty in an arid land, the humor in tragedy, and the vitality of stories nearly forgotten. In the early 1990s, Hawkins left Fort Worth for Austin to attend the University of Texas. At UT, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a B.A. in English and psychology, after some time spent studying abroad at Oxford University. He taught special needs elementary students in a Title I East Austin school, experience which led to his current job as editor, writer, and language specialist for an educational publishing company. Later, he attended Texas Tech University, where he earned an M.A. in technical communication. Hawkins's poetry has appeared in AGNI, The Bitter Oleander, Modern Haiku, The Louisville Review, Bayou Magazine, Parcel, The American Literary Review, Southwestern American Literature, and dozens of other journals. His poems are found in anthologies such as Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga (Dos Gatos Press, 2013), Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016), and Texas Weather (Lamar University Press, 2016). He has presented and discussed poetry on panels at the University of Mississippi's Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference, Tarleton State University's Langdon Review Arts Festival, and Oklahoma State University's Graduate Humanities Conference. He still lives in Texas with his beloved wife Shannon-whom he has known since he was four-and his three children. When they can, they travel to lost and forgotten places, poking around abandoned buildings and cemeteries in the middle of nowhere, inventing stories. Other times, they're perfectly happy escaping to the family ranch in the valley of Star Mountain on the northern edge of the Texas Hill Country.
