Joseph Bottum is poetry editor of the New York Sun, director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University, and author of three books of formal poetry: The Fall and Other Poems (2001), The Second Spring (2011), and Spending the Winter (2022). A native of South Dakota, he is also an author of children’s verse, sharing the 2019 Christopher Award for the year’s best children’s book, The World Is Awake. The former literary editor of the Weekly Standard and editor of First Things, Bottum is also the author of the South Dakota childhood memoir The Christmas Plains (2012), the sociological study An Anxious Age (2014), and the literary study The Decline of the Novel (2019). Over 1,000 of his essays and reviews have appeared in publications from The Atlantic to The Washington Post. He has been the #1 bestselling author on Amazon twice with his commissioned Kindle Singles. Bottum holds a Ph.D. in medieval philosophy and has been profiled and interviewed in The New York Times, Le Figaro, Il Foglio, and many other publications. He lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota.