William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist. He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
James Harrison was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He was a prolific and versatile writer publishing over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and memoir. He wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and published essays on food, travel, and sport. Harrison indicated that, of all his writing, his poetry meant the most to him. He published 24 novellas during his lifetime and is considered "America’s foremost master" of that form. His first commercial success came with the 1979 publication of the trilogy of novellas, Legends of the Fall, two of which were made into movies. Harrison's work has been translated into multiple languages including Spanish, French, Greek, Chinese, and Russian. He was the recipient of multiple awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969), the Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature (1990), and induction into the American Academy of Arts & Letters (2007). Harrison wrote that "The dream that I could write a good poem, a good novel, or even a good movie for that matter, has devoured my life."
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
Franz Wright was an American poet. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.
Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic and anthologist. He taught at Syracuse University.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Ilya Kaminsky is a hard-of-hearing, USSR-born, Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He is best known for his poetry collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic, which have earned him several awards.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Matthea Harvey is a contemporary American poet, writer and professor. She has published four collections of poetry. The most recent of these, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, a collection of poetry and images, was published in 2014. Prior to this, the collection Modern Life (2007) earned her the 2009 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book.
John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska.
Copper Canyon Press is an independent, non-profit small press, specializing in the publication of poetry and located in Port Townsend, Washington. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively.
Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet who is Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published four collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and The Boston Review.
Dennis O'Driscoll was an Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor. Regarded as one of the best European poets of his time, Eileen Battersby considered him "the lyric equivalent of William Trevor" and a better poet "by far" than Raymond Carver. Gerard Smyth regarded him as "one of poetry's true champions and certainly its most prodigious archivist". His book on Seamus Heaney is regarded as the definitive biography of the Nobel laureate.
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Matthew Dickman is an American poet. He and his identical twin brother, Michael Dickman, also a poet, were born in Portland, Oregon.
Michael Dickman is an American poet born August 20, 1975 in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, and Narrative Magazine. Michael Dickman currently teaches at Princeton University.
Timothy Liu is an American poet and the author of such books as Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse, For Dust Thou Art, Of Thee I Sing, Hard Evidence, Say Goodnight, Burnt Offerings and Vox Angelica. He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist and novelist. Vuong is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.
