C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She earned a BA in French from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue …
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. …
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts,…
Kate Chopin was an American author whose fiction grew out of the complex cultures and contradictions of Louisiana life, and she gradually became one of the most distinctive voices in nineteenth centur…
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who, despite the fact that less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, is widely considered one of the most original…
Arnold Stark Lobel was a popular American author of children's books. Among his most popular books are those of the Frog and Toad series, and Mouse Soup, which won the Garden State Children's Book Awa…
Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensit…
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her …
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton…
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Par…
Richard Siken is an American poet, painter, and filmmaker. His poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist…
Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winn…
Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the …
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972.
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1932–2004) is one of the most important and influential poets in the post Independence Indian poetry. He was born on 1 November 1932 at Kolhapur, Maharastra. He had his educa…
Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and t…
Ilya Kaminsky is the Poetry Editor of Words Without Borders. His awards include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine and first place in the National Russian Essay Contest. He is the author of …
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He earned a BA from New York University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from …
Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, wh…
Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the Universi…
Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other…
Layli Long Soldier is the author of WHERREAS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a citizen of the Ogla…
Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valua…
Natalie Díaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her …
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the W…
