Aaron Shurin received his M.A. in Poetics from New College of California, where he studied under poet Robert Duncan. He is a recipient of California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in poetry (1989, 2002), and a NEA fellowship in creative nonfiction (1995). Shurin is the former Associate Director of the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University and the author of numerous books of poetry, including: Into Distances (1993), The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (1999), A Door (2000), Involuntary Lyrics (2005); and volumes of prose, including Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997) and King of Shadows (2008), a collection of essays.

Aaron Shurin has taught extensively in the fields of American poetry and poetics, contemporary and classical prosody, improvisational techniques in composition, and the personal essay. According to his biography at the University of San Francisco where he teaches, his own work is framed by the innovative traditions in lyric poetry as they extend the central purpose of the Romantic Imagination: to attend the world in its particularities, body and soul.

Shurin's poetics might be described as a poetics of the voice in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and of those who followed. Writes Shurin:

Following upon Whitman and Dickinson, Shurin acknowledges a multiplicity of influences on his sense of a poetics: