Mary Kay Rummel grew up in Saint Paul. She attended St. Catherine University and the University of Minnesota and is a professor emerita from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The Lifeline Trembles, won the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her first book, This Body She’s Entered, was a Minnesota Book Award winner. Love in the End was an award winner from Bright Hill Press. Teaching part of the year at California State University, Channel Islands, she divides her time between Fridley and Ventura, California where she was named a Poet Laureate of Ventura County from 2014-2016. Her work has ten Pushcart nominations and appears in numerous national and regional literary journals and anthologies including Nimrod, Water-Stone Review, Great River Review, and Gyroscope Review.