C. S. Giscombe was born in 1950 in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from Jane Addams Elementary School and Chaminade High School (both in Dayton) and from SUNY at Albany and Cornell University. He was editor, through the 1980s, of Epoch magazine. He has taught at Cornell, Syracuse University, Illinois State University, and in the New York State Poets-in-the-Schools program. He currently lives in Bellefonte, PA and teaches in the MFA program at Penn State. He is a director of the Mixed Blood talks and publication series and is Engineer Certification Program Administrator for the Bellefonte Historical Railroad.