Joel Brouwer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1968. He earned his bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1990 and a master's degree from Syracuse University in 1993. He was a visiting assistant professor in the creative writing department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for the 2000-2001 academic year. Though his poems are anything but typical contemporary mainstream works, they have been published in several of America's most prestigious journals, including the Boston Review, Harvard Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review. In addition to his teaching position, he is also a freelance writer and critic and has written reviews for the Progressive and the Harvard Review.

The poem "Last Request" appears in Brouwer's first collection of poetry, Exactly What Happened, published in 1999. The manuscript was awarded the 1998 Verna Emery Prize by Purdue University Press and was published by Purdue the following year. In 2000, Exactly...