John Palen grew up in small towns in southwest Missouri and attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a student of Donald Finkel. His poems have been published in literary magazines since the late 1960s. Recent work has appeared in Bluestem, MacNeese Review, Main Street Rag, Delmarva Review, and upstreet. Mayapple Press published Open Communion: New and Selected Poems in 2005, SMALL ECONOMIES in 2012, and DISTANT MUSIC in 2017. After a 45-year career as a journalist and journalism educator, Palen lives in retirement in central Illinois.