Mark Cox chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship, two awards from the Vermont Council on the Arts, and a Bread Loaf Writers' conference Fellowship.

Cox has published poems in such magazines as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Crazyhorse. Ampersand Press published his chapbook, Barbells of the Gods, in 1988. Godine published Smoulder, his first full-length collection in 1989. His second collection, Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, and his latest book, Natural Causes, were both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.