Jeffery Beam is the author of ten works of poetry including The Fountain, Visions of Dame Kind, the IPPY Ten Best Books and AIGA Fifty Best Books award-winning, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, and the Audio Publishers Association Audie Award in Poetry finalist CD collection, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977-2001 (PDF). Beam's work has appeared in numerous magazines and he has been a frequent reviewer for Lambda Book Report and other literary reviews. Recipient of a Mary Duke Biddle Foundation grant, Beam also performed his work at Carnegie Hall in 2002. He is a botanical librarian at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review. The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems will appear next year from Off the Cuff Books. He is currently working on a commissioned opera libretto based on the Demeter/Persephone myth.