Kevin Prufer's newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024), a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award. His eight previous books include Churches, named one of The New York Times' ten Best Poetry Books of 2015, and How He Loved Them, which was longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press.

Prufer's work has appeared widely in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and other organizations.

He is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate and Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he also directs the Unsung Masters Series, a publishing initiative devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. His forthcoming books include Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2027) and the novel Summer of Shooting Stars (Slant Books, 2028).