Erica McAlpine was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She studied English and Latin poetry as an undergraduate at Harvard before earning an MPhil in English from Cambridge and a PhD from Yale. Her poems have appeared in many magazines including The Times Literary Supplement , The Spectator , Parnassus , and Slate. She is Associate Professor and Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where she lives with her husband and two children. The Country Gambler (2016) is her first book of poems.