Pastor of Melville Avenue Baptist Church, Charles A. Swanson also teaches dual enrollment college composition at the Academy for Engineering and Technology in Danville, Virginia. He is a graduate of Radford University with an M.A. in English, and he has an MFA from Queens University, Charlotte, where he completed a volume of poetic responses to the Old Testament Psalms. MotesBooks released After the Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms in July of 2009, and Farm Life and Legend, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, came out in November of the same year.