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 …
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He publis…
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,…
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Pete…
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…
Rosmarie Waldrop (born August 24, 1935), née Sebald, is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Provide…
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 …
Larry Patrick Levis was born in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1946. His father was a grape grower, and in his youth Levis drove a tractor, pruned vines, and picked grapes in Selma, California. …
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…
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and late…
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…
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 col…
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…
Mark Doty is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Deep Lane and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award. He lives in New …
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 …
Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry s…
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the no…
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…
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 …
Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduat…
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…
Sufism inspired writings of Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi; these writings express the longing of the soul for union with the divine.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeou…
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…
