Bin Ramke

Poet and editor Bin Ramke was born in Port Neches, Texas, spent time in Louisiana when he was young, and attended Louisiana State University. Once a student of mathematics, Ramke studied literature as an undergraduate and earned a PhD from Ohio University. The author of many poetry collections, including Missing the Moon (2014), Aerial (2012), and Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems (2009), Ramke combines these typically disparate interests to inform his poems. Of Ramke’s collection Tendril (2007), John Ashbery wrote, “Bin Ramke’s poetry presents itself as the product of curious research on many different topics, most particularly etymology, but with side trips to mathematics, Greek philosophy, the poetry of Rilke and Christopher Smart— just about anything, in fact.”

Ramke has said of his writing, “The sort of work I do is concerned with sound, but in a subtle, nuanced way. It’s a combination of personal imagination and experience—experience in an unrecognizable form.” Ramke draws from a broad range of sources for his poetry and is willing to allow the “accidental” to enter the writing process.

His first collection of poems, The Difference Between Night and Day (1978), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His books The Massacre of the Innocents (1994) and Wake (1998) were both awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Ramke was editor of the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series from 1984 to 2005. He teaches at the University of Denver, where he edits Denver Quarterly.