Dan Campion was born in 1949 in Oak Park, Illinois, and grew up on the West Side of Chicago. He received an AB from the University of Chicago in 1970, held several factory jobs, then worked as an editor, and in 1975 earned an MA from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1978 he moved to Iowa City, Iowa, earning a PhD in 1989 from the University of Iowa. He served as a visiting assistant professor of English there from 1991 through 1995 and worked from 1984 to 2013 as an editor for ACT. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies since the mid-1970s.