Catherine Staples grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, spending summers in Virginia and on Cape Cod. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Commonweal, Third Coast, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Prime Number, and Quarterly West among other magazines. Her chapbook Never a Note Forfeit (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011) won the Keystone Prize. She teaches in the Honors program at Villanova University and lives with her family in Devon, Pennsylvania.