Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. For many years, he was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of seven collections of poetry from Carnegie Mellon, most recently of which is Sojourners of the In-Between. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in many anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), among others.