Brandon Kilbourne is a Pushcart-nominated poet and biologist, whose work has appeared in Poet Lore, Obsidian, Ecotone, Terrain.org, West Trade Review, Split Rock Review, and numerous other literary journals. Writing poems intertwined with natural history, he has given readings at conferences on entomology, natural history, and paleontology in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Born in Louisiana, he earned his BS in Biological Engineering at Louisiana State University before earning his PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Having worked more than twenty years in natural history, he has worked at museums in Denver, Chicago, and Berlin and has worked with collections and done fieldwork across the globe. Throughout his career his scientific studies have appeared in such journals as Evolution and Science Advances and have received support from the German Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation. In 2014-2015, he was a College for Life Sciences Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, where he also first started to seriously pursue poetry. In 2024, he was Artist-in-Residence in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University. In 2025, he was a Cave Canem Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize. His first poetry collection, Natural History, will be published in autumn 2025 by Graywolf Press.