Nicky Beer is the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010) both received the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.