Ken Bluford was born in 1949 in Philadelphia to a middle-class but illustrious family (his father was a mechanical engineer, his mother a teacher, his aunt was the famed contralto Carol Brice, and his brother is Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut to make it to outer space). Ken graduated from both New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and later became the first black professor at Kenyon College in 1975. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was involved with the poetry scene centered around Middle Earth Books in Philadelphia alongside the likes of Victor Bockris, Andrew Wylie, Otis Brown, Jeff Goldberg and others. While attending NYU he hung around the nascent Poetry Project, and at night frequented avant-garde jazz clubs like Slugs in the East Village, taking in the Sun Ra Arkestra, Archie Shepp, and Lee Morgan among many others. Throughout the 1970s he published poems, essays, and book reviews (on John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Gary Snyder etc) in little magazines like LIP, Contact, and the Painted Bride Quarterly. There were some scattered chapbooks, as well as a co-publication with the great poet Tom Weatherly published by Middle Earth Books, but despite being a prolific and extremely excellent writer he has published little over the past few decades, of late usually preferring to share a single poem a day or so with a small group of friends on Facebook. Skip Tracing is his first major collection.