Nicky Beer (she/her) is a bi/queer writer and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Her other books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), both won the Colorado Book Award for poetry. She has received support and honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor and a poetry editor for Copper Nickel at the University of Colorado Denver.