Hicok is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech and an associate professor of English at Purdue University. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business. He formerly taught at Western Michigan University. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review, as well as in eight volumes of The Best American Poetry and six times in the Pushcart Prize anthology.