David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 13, 1940. He was a New York City seminary student and a teacher at a historically black Pennsylvania college. In the late 1960s, he started teaching writing and poetry in Vermont schools, including through a program of the Vermont Arts Council called Writers in the Schools. During his lifetime, he wrote ten books of poems, seven plays, two novels, a short story collection, two children's books, and an opera libretto. His books included While We've Still Got Feet, Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse, Tumbling Toward the End, Happy Life, Broken Wing, and Judevine: The Complete Poems, 1970-1990. He died from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a rare form of Parkinson's Disease, on September 25, 2016 at the age of 76.