Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. As a young man he worked with Academy Award-winning film maker, Michael Moore as an arts editor and reporter on Moore's newspaper, The Flint Voice (later The Michigan Voice), was widely published in the alternative press, and also worked as a cartoonist. He attended the University of Michigan at Flint and Ann Arbor, during which time he won three Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing, an honor shared with Max Apple, John Ciardi, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Hayden, Laura Kasischke, Jane Kenyon, Arthur Miller, Howard Moss, Frank O'Hara, Marge Piercy, Ronald Wallace, and Nancy Willard, among others. He is author of seven books, including I Am Spam (Fractal Edge Press, 2004), a series of poems 'inspired' by spam email, and has been widely-anthologized and published in the United States and abroad. In 2004, he was recipient of the Hands on Stanzas Gwendolyn Brooks Award, from the Poetry Center of Chicago. In addition to writing poetry, Dean has been a feelance journalist, working for such publications as SF Weekly, Option, Cake, Time Out, and Amplifier. He teaches poetry in the Chicago Public Schools, gives frequent readings, and is a singer-songwriter, working both solo as well as with several pop bands, including Post Office, The Me Decade, and currently, The Injured Parties. After living in San Francisco for over a decade, and despite rampant gentrification, he currently makes his home in Chicago.