Harry Humes's first collection of poetry, Winter Weeds, won the 1983 Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. Ridge Music was an Associated Writing Programs Contest finalist. In 1993 he won the Eighth Annual World's Greatest Short Short Story Competition for "The Cough." Humes, born in Girardville, Pennsylvania, in 1935, is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Poetry Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches English at Kutztown University and lives in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.