Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in English. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, poetry editor of the Paris Review, and has published a critical study, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, with the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

His Bloodaxe selection Natural History and other poems (2006) drew on two collections published in the US, The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). His latest collection is Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, US / Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010).

He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and teaches at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.