Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015) and The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her third book of poems, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, was published by Milkweed Editions March 2022, and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for the journal Copper Nickel.