Peter Middleton was born in 1950 and grew up in both England and the United States. After a first degree at Oxford University, he took a PhD at Sheffield University, and studied for a year at SUNY Buffalo with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke. He is the author of a book on masculinity, The Inward Gaze (1992), co-author with Tim Woods of Literatures of Memory (2000), and author of a book of essays on poetics, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). His poetry and essays have appeared in magazines in the UK and US, and with Piers Hugill he is editor of Torque Press. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton.