Collection Items

  • Biography
    Diane Ackerman Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1948. She is the author of over a dozen nonfiction works, including The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007), which was a New York Times bestseller and adapted into a feature film; One Hundred Names for Love (2011), which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book […]
  • Biography
    Betty Adcock Betty Adcock was born in San Augustine, Texas, in 1938. She has published six collections of poetry, including Walking Out: Poems (1975); Rough Fugue (2017); and Slantwise: Poems (2008), which was the winner of the L.E. Phillabaum Prize from Louisiana State University Press. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, a North Carolina Award for Literature, […]
  • Biography
    Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi in 1949. He is the author of 10 poetry collections, including In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), and Rooms are Never Finished (2001). His honors include fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, […]
  • Biography
    Conrad Aiken
    U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1950-1952
    Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was born in Savannah, Georgia. A poet, fiction writer, and essayist, Aiken published 33 collections of poetry. In 1924, Aiken edited Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems, the first English edition of her work.
  • Biography
    Vasily Aksyonov Vasily Aksyonov was born in Kazan, USSR, in 1932. He is the author of more than 20 novels, including Oranges from Morocco (1963), The Island of Crimea (1979), and The Burn (1980). He became one of the informal leaders of the Shestidesyatniki (roughly translated as “the ‘60s generation”), an anti-totalitarian group, and in 1980 he […]
  • Biography
    Daisy Aldan Daisy Aldan was born in New York City in 1918. She was a poet, editor, translator, and an active member of the New York School poetry scene in the 1950s and 60s. Among her many poetry collections, Between High Tides (1978) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Aldan’s other honors include a fellowship from the […]
  • Biography
    Elizabeth Alexander Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, in 1962. She is the author of 11 poetry collections, including The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), and American Sublime (2005). Her honors include fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation. She also received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime […]
  • Biography
    Karen Alkalay-Gut Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London in 1945 and grew up in Rochester, New York. She is the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry in both Hebrew and English, including Avra Cadivra (2013) and Nisim vechulei (2012). She also wrote a biography of Victorian poet Adelaide Crapsey, Alone in the Dark: The Life […]
  • Biography
    A. R. Ammons
    1994 Bobbitt Prize Winner
    A. R. Ammons was born near Whiteville, North Carolina, in 1926. He published 29 poetry collections, including Garbage (1993), which received the National Book Award and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; A Coast of Trees (1981), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Collected Poems, 1951-1971 (1972), which won the National Book Award.
  • Biography
    Michael Anania Michael Anania was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1939. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Selected Poems (1994), In Natural Light (1999), and Heat Lines (2006). He is also the author of a novel, The Red Menace (1984), and an essay collection, In Plain Sight: Obsessions, Morals, and Domestic Laughter (1992). Anania […]
  • Biography
    Lee Anderson Lee Anderson was born in Saxton, Pennsylvania, in 1896. As a writer he is best known for his tetralogy of long poems: Prevailing Winds (1944), The Floating World (1954), Nags Head (1960), and Bearstone (1969). A champion of poetry as an oral/aural tradition, he recorded over 150 writers reading and discussing their work over the […]
  • Biography
    Phyllis Armstrong Phyllis Armstrong was born in India in 1910. She is the author of one book of poetry, A Witness to Washington (1972). She was the Special Assistant in Poetry at the Library of Congress for over 25 years, where she worked with 14 Poet Laureates. For her service, Armstrong was awarded the Amos. R. Koontz […]
  • Biography
    John Ashbery John Ashbery (credit: Lynn Davis) John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of more than 20 poetry collections, including Some Trees (1956), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by W. H. Auden; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book […]
  • Biography
    Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood credit Jean Malek Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1939. She is the author of fourteen novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1993), and Blind Assassin (2000), which received the Booker Prize. She has also written eight short story collections and more than twenty books of poetry, […]
  • Biography
    Kofi Awoonor Kofi Awoonor Kofi Awoonor was born George Awoonor-Williams in Wheta, Ghana, in 1935. In addition to translating poetry from the local Ewe dialect, Awoonor wrote and published novels, plays, political essays, literary criticism, and several volumes of poetry, including Night of My Blood (1971), The House by the Sea (1978), and, posthumously, The Promise of […]
  • Biography
    Helen Bacon Helen Bacon was born in Berkeley, California, in 1919. A classics scholar and writer, she authored numerous books and essays of literary criticism, including The Sibyl in the Bottle (1958), Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (1961), and “In- and Outdoor Schooling: Robert Frost and the Classics” (1974). With poet and former Consultant in Poetry Anthony Hecht, Bacon translated Aeschylus’ Seven […]
  • Biography
    James Baldwin James Baldwin James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. Baldwin’s many novels include his debut, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), considered an American classic. He was also a poet and a playwright, but is most well known and remembered as an essayist and social critic. Baldwin’s nonfiction collections include Notes from a […]
  • Biography
    Toni Cade Bambara Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem in 1939. She is the author of over a dozen short story collections, novels and essays, including Gorilla, My Love (1972), The Salt Eaters (1980), and Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). She was also the editor of several anthologies, including The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) […]
  • Biography
    Julia Watson Barbour Julia Watson Barbour was born in 1923. A Washington, D.C., poet, she is the author of the poetry collection Shaggy Banks (2016). Barbour died in 2006.Audio Recordings with Julia Watson Barbour Julia Watson Barbour reading her poems with comment in the Recording Laboratory, Mar. 22, 1978
  • Biography
    Gene Baro Gene Baro was born in New York City in 1924. He authored five books, including Beat Poets (1954), Claes Oldenburg (1969), and Nevelson (1974). His poetry and short stories were published in a wide variety of journals, including The New Yorker, and his largest poetry collection was published in Poetry Today VI as “Northwind.” He […]
  • Biography
    Dorothy Barresi Dorothy Barresi was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1957. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including The Judas Clock (1986), Post-Rapture Diner (1996), and Rouge Pulp (2002). Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an American Book Award. She teaches in the English department at California […]
  • Biography
    Donald Barthelme Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. He is the author of four novels and over 10 short story collections, including Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Award for children’s literature, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection […]
  • Biography
    John Beecher John Beecher, the great-great-nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was born in New York City in 1904. Known as an activist poet and journalist who supported the American civil rights and labor movements, Beecher wrote nearly a dozen poetry collections and two nonfiction books. Among his publications are Here I Stand (1940), In Egypt Land (1960), […]
  • Biography
    Patricia Beer Patricia Beer was born in Exmouth, England, in 1919. She published 10 poetry collections, including The Loss of the Magyar (1959), The Lie of the Land (1983), and Collected Poems (1989); a novel, Moon’s Ottery (1978); her memoir, Mrs. Beer’s House (1968); and a study on Victorian fiction, Reader, I Married Him (1975). She taught […]
  • Biography
    Erin Belieu Erin Belieu was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1967. She is the author of four poetry collections; Infanta (1995) was selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series, and Slant Six (2014) was named a top-10 book of the year by The New York Times. Belieu is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Fellowship, […]