Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University and studied American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He edited a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, for 15 years. From 1994-2001, he was vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation (now a unit of Dell), then was chief operating officer of a biotech/life sciences start-up. He served as a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities (“Mass Humanities”) from 2015-2020, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He was a judge for the 2019 PEN America Translation Prize. He lives in Aquinnah, Massachusetts.
The Incentive of the Maggot, his first book of poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The collection won the Bakeless Poetry Prize (Breadloaf Writers Conference) and the Larry Levis Reading Prize of Virginia Commonwealth University. The Great Wave, his second book, was also published by Houghton. His new collection, Joy Ride, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2023.
In 2016, Ron and his daughter Jenny Slate co-wrote a memoir, About The House, published via the generosity-based Concord Free Press, helping to raise over $250,000 for non-profit organizations in the USA and abroad including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
