Ben is originally from San Antonio, Texas and that is where he started writing and became involved with literary magazines for the first time, working as an editor of his high school's long-running lit mag, The Walrus, for three years. Ben continued to work as a reader for literary magazines throughout college and after finally graduating with a BA in History from the University of North Florida, enrolled at George Mason University for his MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. While at George Mason, along with teaching English Composition and Literature, Ben worked as an assistant editor at phoebe, a literary magazine that has been edited and published by George Mason MFA students since 1971. Ben received his MFA in 2015 after completing his thesis, a collection of essays about living in China titled Culture Shock.

Ben and his family are avid travelers, and Ben has studied abroad in the Netherlands, lived in China, and traveled to a variety of countries from Macedonia to North Korea. He's been an educator since 2007 and spent three years teaching at Gould Academy, a small boarding school for high school students in northern Maine, from 2015-2018. While Ben has worked in the background at Polyphony Lit for over a year designing courses, he's excited to work directly with the editors and readers who make everything happen!