Alan Clanton is a native of Jacksonville, Florida and a graduate of Florida State University. A lifelong student of poetry, his first formal collection as an English major was titled Godzilla Versus Opie Taylor, for which he won the Cody Allen Harris undergraduate poetry prize at Florida State University. His poems have appeared in Kudzu Review and Snake Nation Review. The poems which appear in Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant are taken from two previous collections: The Geometry of the Clouds (completed in 1999) and Transparent Moon (2006). He was the editor of the student newspaper Thursday Review in Jacksonville, and in 2007 and 2008 wrote the weekly newsletter Roadshow: The Presidential Campaign in Review. He has lived in Alabama for the past 15 years.
