Mark D. Bennion grew up in Wisconsin, Utah, and Idaho. In his undergraduate days, he studied at Ricks College and Brigham Young University, majoring in English and minoring in Korean. Upon graduating from BYU, he lived in Jerusalem for a year and studied language and literature at Hebrew University. After his time in the Holy Land, he attended the MFA program at the University of Montana and finished there in 2000. Since then, he has taught composition, creative writing, and literature courses at BYU-Idaho. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Association for Mormon Letters award in poetry, he is the author of three previous poetry collections: Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through The Book of Mormon (2009, Bentley Enterprises), Forsythia (2013, Aldrich Press), and Beneath the Falls: poems (2021, Resource Publications). Mark and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of four daughters and one son.
