Forrest Hamer, a former winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Northern California Book Award, is an Oakland, California psychologist and affiliate member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. His poetry appears in many journals, and he has received fellowships from the California Arts Council and Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. He has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops. Rift is his third collection of poems, following Call & Response (1995) and Middle Ear (2000).