Bruce Beasley is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Prayershreds (Orison Books, 2023), All Soul Parts Returned (BOA Editions, 2017), and Theophobia (BOA Editions, 2012). The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems was published by The University of Washington Press in 2007. His previous collection, Lord Brain, an extended meditation on neuroscience, cosmology, theology, and language, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award and was published in 2005. Beasley won the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 1996 for Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright, and the 1994 Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation. Wesleyan University Press published his books Spirituals (1988) and Signs and Abominations (2000).

He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry.  His work also appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize, as well as other anthologies including Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries; Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets; Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951-1977; American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets; Poems of Devotion; Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry; and More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems. His poems appear widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New American Writing, Field, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Yale Review. 

Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and now lives in Bellingham, Washington. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Western Washington University and, in 2013, recipient of the university’s Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award. He lives with his wife, poet, novelist, and nonfiction author Suzanne Paola, and their son Jin.