Over the decades, William Heyen has most often dreamed of, studied, and written about the Holocaust. Now, Shoah Train collects more than seventy poems written over the last dozen years, lyrics of discipline and honesty and courage and restraint, as Archibald MacLeish described The Swastika Poems. Shoah Train was a National Book Award finalist for poetry in 2004.

William Heyen is a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany and has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in many leading journals and more than one hundred anthologies. Shoah Train was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004. He is professor of English and poet in residence at the State University of New York at Brockport.