Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati.  He has published four volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent (Kent State University Press) won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest, If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published in 2001, The Dark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize, and Into Night’s Tent (River Glass Books 2020).  He has a fourth volume titled A Palace of Strangers Is No City, a sustained narrative of prose poetry/flash fiction, published by Cervena Barva Press in 2011. His translation from the Dutch of Menno Wigman’s book of poems Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar was published in 2012. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council. 

He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides.  Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection.

Stephen Frech was a Professor of English at Millikin University for over 20 years and is now the Eductional Leader at Unity Christian School in Decatur, Illinois