Hal R. Boyd graduated with honors from Brigham Young University, where he first began researching early Latter-day Saint poetry. He has written professionally for both the Deseret News and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his writing has appeared in various venues, including BYU Studies Quarterly and The Oxford Handbook to Mormonism (2015). Hal and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is currently a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School.