Description
Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to
deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world,
they are at times informed by the themes and landscapes of classical mythology.
She has published 12 volumes of verse to date, including The Seven Ages, Vita
Novo, Triumph of Achilles and Averno. Her book The Wild Iris received the 1993
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has since received virtually every other major award
for poetry, including the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for her lifetime achievement. In
2003, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States.
Born in New York City, she began writing at an early age. She studied at Sarah
Lawrence and Columbia University, and although she never took a degree herself,
she has spent much of her life teaching in universities. For 20 years, she taught at
Williams College in Massachusetts. She now teaches in the creative writing
program at Boston University and is the Rosencranz Writer in Residence at Yale
University. Her 2009 book, A Village Life, is a collection of dramatic vignettes of
everyday life in an unnamed Mediterranean community, where an ancient way of
life, governed by the seasons, is gradually giving way to the pressures of
modernity. A comprehensive collection, Poems 1962-2012, will appear this
November.
This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as
United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the
position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs
of...
Published 10/27/12
Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories...
Published 07/03/09
In novels such as the modern classic, Beloved, Toni Morrison has fused history and legend, realism and fantasy, to craft an epic saga of African American life. Although her work is steeped in local history and folklore, the fundamental human values of her art have captured the hearts of readers...
Published 06/21/07