Carol Muske-Dukes was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945. She is the author of 10 poetry collections, including Camouflage (1975); National Book Award finalist An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems (1997); and Blue Rose (2018). She has also written essays, novels, and autobiographies, including Married to The Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood (2002), Life After Death: A Novel (2001), and Saving St. Germ (1993). Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Witter Bynner fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. She also served as the poet laureate of California from 2008 to 2011. She has taught in the graduate programs at Columbia University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Virginia. She founded the PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South California after beginning teaching there in 1993. Muske-Dukes lives in Los Angeles.
Audio Recordings with Carol Muske-Dukes
- 1998 Witter Bynner Fellows Carol Muske and Carl Phillips reading their poems in the Montpelier
Room, Library of Congress, October 16, 1998