Peter Jay Shippy was born in Niagara Falls, New York. He was raised on his family's apple farm, on the shore of Lake Ontario. He was educated at Northwestern University, Emerson College and the University of Iowa, where he received an MFA. Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books published Alphaville, an abecedarian suite, in 2006. Rose Metal Press will release How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic, a novel-in-verse, in 2007. His work has been published in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Shenandoah, among others. Shippy has been awarded writing fellowships in poetry and drama from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a poetry grant from National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006 he received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry.