Born from noble lineage on Saint Bobo's Day in Edmonton, Canada, Nat Hardy worked as a roughneck and a roustabout on the offshore drilling rig Drillstar in the North Sea, assembled electric transformers in London, England, was a garbage man, a warehouseman, a heavy equipment operator, a concrete worker, a truck driver, a lifeguard, a farm hand, a carpenter, a drywaller, a painter, a gas jockey, and a stand-up philosopher before deciding to go to college and become a writer.

Over the course of his varied occupations, he has lived in London, England, Aviemore and Aberdeen, Scotland, Hamilton, Canada, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lincoln City, Oregon and Stillwater and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nat especially enjoys living in exotic global locales especially amidst the bucolic splendor of his ancestral home on the range: the Great Plains.

Nat attended the University of Alberta where he received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Restoration literature from McMaster University. He returned to the University of Alberta to complete a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature with supervisor Jonathan Hart. He finally completed his studies by receiving an M.F.A. from Louisiana State University under the corpse-wielding tutelage of Andrei Codrescu and the spiritual spark of Rodger Kamenetz.

Nat Hardy is assistant professor of creative writing and literature in the Department of Communications and Fine Arts at Rogers State University. He has held teaching positions at several universities including: Oklahoma State University, Louisiana State University, McMaster University and the University of Alberta.

Nat has edited a number of literary journals. At LSU he was Editor-in-Chief of the New Delta Review and an editorial staff member of the Exquisite Corpse. He is currently a member of the editorial staff at Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Cimarron Review and a series editor for the online journal, The Muse Apprenticeship Guild.

At LSU he received an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, a Favorite Professor Award from Delta Zeta and was twice nominated for the Sarah L. Liggett Teaching Award and was a finalist for the College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Teaching Award. In 2003, he was awarded a Community Service Award for Excellence from Oklahoma State University for his Service Learning Courses with Habitat for Humanity and an Arch Humanitarian Award from McMaster University which recognizes notable contributions to the arts and culture.

In his spare time he volunteer teaches a Poetry and Spoken Word Workshop at the Pershing Academy for at-risk youth in Tulsa and is a Mentor and Judge for Penning with the Pros, a Seven-State Education Consortium promoting Creative Writing for K-12 Students.

Nat's writing has been published in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the Czech Republic. He has received a number of Creative Writing Awards including the Robert Penn Warren Memorial Award for Poetry, the Louise Glück Academy of American Poets Award for Poetry and was a runner-up for the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

He is currently working on a short fiction collection entitled Small Betrayals a juvenile bildungsroman charting the unprivileged life of a troubled youth to recidivist manhood. His other work includes poetry book very loosely based on his life in America called In the Temple of Off-Ramps. Nat has several has several other on-going collaborations: an art/poetry project with English artist Julian Grater entitled Another Place, a series of Czech/English poetry translations with Helena Rychlíková and a ceramics/poetry venture with California ceramics artist, Craig Clifford.