Mark Slomiany was raised in Rutherford, New Jersey. Writing from his first-generation Polish-American experience, he was profoundly influenced from a young age by the poetry of Rutherford’s William Carlos Williams and the novels of Jack Kerouac. Slomiany is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and the Medical University of South Carolina. He resides in Charleston as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia with a secondary faculty appointment at the Medical University of South Carolina.