Sherry Fairchok was born in Scranton in 1962. She spent the early part of her childhood in Taylor, PA, a coal-mining town, in which her family has lived since the 1880s, and where her grandfather, great-uncles, and great-grandfather worked as miners. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and an M.F. A. degree from Sarah Lawrence college. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Ploughshares, DoubleTake, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. She works as an information technology editor and lives in Mount Vernon, NY. In 2003, CavanKerry Press published her collection The Palace of Ashes.