Rachel Contreni Flynn was born in Paris in 1969 and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. Her second full-length collection of poetry, Tongue, won the Benjamin Saltman Award and was published in 2010 by Red Hen Press. Her chapbook, Haywire, was published by Bright Hill Press in 2009, and her first book Ice, Mouth, Song, was published in 2005 by Tupelo Press, after winning the Dorset Prize. She was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007. Her work has often been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she received two literature grants from the Illinois Arts Council. She is an instructor in poetry at Northwestern University and a graduate of Indiana University and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Rachel lives north of Chicago with her husband and their two children.