Joseph Stroud was born in Glendale, California, 1943, and educated at the University of San Francisco, California State University at Los Angeles, and San Francisco State University. His work earned a Pushcart Prize in 2000. He was a finalist for the Northern California Book Critics Award in 2005. In 2006 he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress. He divides his time between his home in Santa Cruz on the California coast and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada.