Michael D. Snediker is the author of The Apartment of Tragic Appliances, a Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry, and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions, a finalist for the MLA First Book Prize. He's also the author of two chapbooks--Nervous Pastoral and Bourdon-- as well as Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Duress from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He's an Associate Professor of American Literature and Poetics at the University of Houston.