Frank O'Hara

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  Thom Yorke

  Thomas "Thom" Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician and singer-songwriter who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but has also played drums and bass guitar (notably during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions). In July 2006, he released his debut solo album, The Eraser.
  
  Yorke has been cited among the most influential figures in the music industry; in 2002, Q Magazine named Yorke the 6th most powerful figure in music, and Radiohead were ranked #73 in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2005. Yorke has also been cited among the greatest singers in popular music; in 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Yorke voted the 18th greatest

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  Wendy Cope

  Wendy Cope was educated at Farringtons School, Chislehurst, London and then, after finishing university at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she worked for 15 years as a primary school teacher in London.
  
  In 1981, she became Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, 'Contact'. Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for 'The Spectator magazine' until 1990.
  
  Her first published work 'Across the City' was in a limited edition, published by the Priapus Press in 1980 and her first commercial book of poetry was 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' in 1986. Since then she has published two further books of poetry and has edited various anthologies of comic verse.
  
  In 1987 she received a Cholmond

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  David Berman

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
  
  David Berman was born in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1967. He graduated from the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, the University of Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts. His band, the Silver Jews, has released four albums, The Natural Bridge, Starlite Walker, American Water, and Bright Flight, on Drag City Records (www.dragcity.com). He resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
  
  Photo credit: Bernd Bodtländer
  
  

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  John Ashbery

  Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).
  
  From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988

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  Adrienne Rich

  Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
  
  A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
  
  In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up polit

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  Arthur Rimbaud

  Hallucinatory work of French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud strongly influenced the surrealists.
  
  With known transgressive themes, he influenced modern literature and arts, prefiguring. He started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian war. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. After assembling his last major work, Illuminations , Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 years in 1874.
  
  A hectic, violent romantic relationship, which lasted nearly two years at times, with fellow poet Paul Verlaine engaged Rimbaud, a libertine, restless soul. Aft

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  David Henry Hwang

  David Henry Hwang (Chinese: 黃哲倫; pinyin: Huáng Zhélún; born August 11, 1957) is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.
  
  He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University. His first play was produced at the Okada House dormitory at Stanford and he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and María Irene Fornés.
  
  He is the author of M. Butterfly (1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Awards, Pulitzer finalist), Golden Child (1998 Tony nomination, 1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad (Drama Desk nomination), Family Devotions (Drama Desk Nomination), Sound and Beauty, and Bondage. His newest

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  Elizabeth Bishop

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
  
  Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
  
  

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• 

  John Ashbery

  Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).
  
  From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988

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• 

  Pierre Reverdy

  Pierre Reverdy (September 13, 1889 – June 17, 1960) was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing “isms,” searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: “the sublime simplicity of reality."
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_R...

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  Elizabeth Smart

  Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile is for Elizabeth^Smart.
  
  Elizabeth Smart (December 27, 1913 – March 4, 1986) was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the poet George Barker. She is the subject of the 1991 biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart a Life, by Rosemary Sullivan, and a film, Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels, produced by Maya Gallus.
  
  

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  Ada Calhoun

  Ada Calhoun is the author of the novel Crush. Her memoir Also a Poet was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post. Prior books include New York Times–bestseller Why We Can't Sleep, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and St. Marks Is Dead.

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  Sally Rooney

  Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.

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  Langston Hughes

  Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
  
  People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...
  

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  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition.
  
  Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti who was from the province of Brescia and Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chap

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• 

  Adrienne Rich

  Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
  
  A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
  
  In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up polit

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• 

  Anne Sexton

  Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.
  
  Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.
  
  In 1953 Anne gave birth

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  Georges Perec

  Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
  
  Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
  
  Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
  
  In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of thi

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  William Carlos Williams

  William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.
  
  Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Mari

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• 

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).
  
  People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
  
  His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
  
  His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malt

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  Sylvia Plath

  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, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
  Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study

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  Allen Ginsberg

  Allen Ginsberg was a groundbreaking American poet and activist best known for his central role in the Beat Generation and for writing the landmark poem Howl. Born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Ginsberg grew up in a household shaped by both intellectualism and psychological struggle. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a published poet and a schoolteacher, while his mother, Naomi, suffered from severe mental illness, which deeply affected Ginsberg and later influenced his writing—most notably in his poem Kaddish.
  As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what bec

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  Walt Whitman

  Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
  Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with hi

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  William Shakespeare

  William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
  Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W

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  Billy Collins

  William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

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  Joan Didion

  Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
  Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United Stat

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  William Carlos Williams

  William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.
  
  Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Mari

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• 

  Stevie Smith

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
  
  Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
  
  

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  Kay Ryan

  Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
  
  Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges lik

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  James Dickey

  Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. After serving as a pilot in the Second World War, he attended Vanderbilt University. Having earned an MA in 1950, Dickey returned to military duty in the Korean War, serving with the US Air Force. Upon return to civilian life Dickey taught at Rice University in Texas and then at the University of Florida. From 1955 to 1961, he worked for advertising agencies in New York and Atlanta. After the publication of his first book, Into the Stone (Middletown, Conn., 1962), he left advertising and began teaching at various colleges and universities. He became poet-in-residence and Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
  
  Dickey's third volume, Buckdancer's Choice (Middletown, 1965), won th

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  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition.
  
  Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti who was from the province of Brescia and Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chap

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• 

  David Berman

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
  
  David Berman was born in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1967. He graduated from the Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, the University of Virginia, and the University of Massachusetts. His band, the Silver Jews, has released four albums, The Natural Bridge, Starlite Walker, American Water, and Bright Flight, on Drag City Records (www.dragcity.com). He resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
  
  Photo credit: Bernd Bodtländer
  
  

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  Elizabeth Bishop

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
  
  Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.
  
  

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• 

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).
  
  People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
  
  His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
  
  His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malt

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• 

  Joe Carrick Varty

  Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in New Statesman, Granta, POETRY, The Poetry Review, The Forward Book of Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry London. He is the author of More Sky (Carcanet Press, 2023), 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020) and Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019). In 2018 he won the New Poets Prize and in 2022 he won an Eric Gregory Award. Joe is currently the 2023 Anthony Burgess Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

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  Alice Notley

  Alice Notley was an American poet. Notley came to prominence as a member of the second generation of the New York School of poetry—although she always denied being involved with the New York School or any specific movement in general. Notley's early work laid both formal and theoretical groundwork for several generations of poets; she was considered a pioneering voice on topics like motherhood and domestic life.
  Notley's experimentation with poetic form, seen in her books 165 Meeting House Lane, When I Was Alive, The Descent of Alette, and Culture of One, ranges from a blurred line between genres, to a quotation-mark-driven interpretation of the variable foot, to a full reinvention of the purpose and potential of strict rhythm and meter. She

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  Nikiforos Vrettakos

  Nikiforos Vrettakos was a Greek writer and poet. Nikephoros Vrettakos was born in the village of Kokees, near Sparta, and published his first collection of poems, Under Shadows and Lights, in 1929, at the age of seventeen. That same year he moved to Athens to attend university, but left after a year to take a series of jobs as a clerk in various businesses. In 1937 he began a thirty year career in the Greek Civil Service, also seeing combat service in the Greco-Italian War during this period. In 1967 he responded to the takeover of Greece by a military dictatorship by going into self-imposed exile in Switzerland and Italy, where he remained until returning to Greece in 1974. He also wrote a poem about Kostas Georgakis, the student who set h

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  Marina Tsvetaeva

  Марина Цветаева
  Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. Tsvetaeva started to write verse in her early childhood. She made her debut as a poet at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood.
  
  In 1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son. Magic Lantern showed her technical mastery and was followed in 1913 by a selection of poems from her first collections. Tsvetaeva's affair with the poet and opera li

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  Jorie Graham

  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 Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
  
  Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
  
  Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American A

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  Gregory Corso

  Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.

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  Zefyr Lisowski

  Zefyr Lisowski is the author of Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024) and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). Raised in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, Zefyr lives in Brooklyn and has seen grave robbers twice.

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  Garrison Keillor

  Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He created the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion (called Garrison Keillor's Radio Show in some international syndication), which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion comic skits. Keillor is also the creator of the five-minute daily radio/podcast program The Writer's Almanac, which pairs poems of his choice with a script about important liter

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  E.E. Cummings

  Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
  
  He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
  
  In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel

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  Marge Piercy

  Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
  
  Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
  
  An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-chil

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  Robert Lowell

  Robert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
  
  His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
  
  Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically in

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  Andrei Codrescu

  Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator. His many books include Whatever Gets You through the Night, The Postmodern Dada Guide, and The Poetry Lesson. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.

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  Samuel Beckett

  Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.
  
  Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.
  
  People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first p

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  Lorine Niedecker

  Niedecker's earliest poetry was marked by her reading of the Imagists, whose work she greatly admired and of surrealism. In 1931, she read the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She was fascinated by what she saw and immediately wrote to Louis Zukofsky, who had edited the issue, sending him her latest poems. This was the beginning of what proved to be a most important relationship for her development as a poet.
  
  Zukofsky suggested sending them to Poetry, where they were accepted for publication. Suddenly, Niedecker found herself in direct contact with the American poetic avant-garde. Near the end of 1933, Niedecker visited Zukofsky in New York City for the first time and became pregnant with his child. He insisted that she have an abortion, which

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  Ted Berrigan

  Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, where he received a BA in English in 1959 and fell just short of the requirements for a M.A. in 1962. Berrigan was married to Sandy Berrigan, also a poet, and they had two children, David Berrigan and Kate Berrigan. He and his second wife, the poet Alice Notley, were active in the poetry scene in Chicago for several years, then moved to New York City, where he edited various magazines and books.
  
  A prominent figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, Berrigan was pee

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  Eula Biss

  Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University, where she teaches nonfiction writing, and she is a founding editor of Essay Press, a new press dedicated to innovative nonfiction. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, The Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.

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  H.D.

  An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

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  Arthur Sze

  Arthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.
  
  Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.
  
  He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laur

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  Diane Seuss

  Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988.

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  James Wright

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
  
  On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two tr

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  Carolyn Forché

  Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Wa

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  Camonghne Felix

  Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”

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  Edgar Kunz

  Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023) and Tap Out (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, POETRY, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore.

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  Sierra DeMulder

  Sierra DeMulder is an internationally-recognized poet, performer, and podcast host. She is a five-time published author, a two-time National Poetry Slam champion, the recipient of a McKnight Foundation fellowship, and the co-host of Just Break Up, a globally popular advice podcast that has been downloaded more than 4 million times.

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  N.H. Pritchard

  Norman Henry Pritchard, or N. H. Pritchard was an American poet. He was a member of the Umbra poets, a collective of Black writers in Manhattan's Lower East Side founded in 1962.

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  Haley McGee

  Haley McGee was born and raised in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. At seventeen she moved to Toronto, where she received a BFA in Acting and subsequently worked as an actor and playwright until she relocated to the UK in 2016.
  
  Heralded as "the formidable Haley McGee" (The Globe and Mail), her award-winning, critically acclaimed solo shows have played in thirty-six venues in eleven countries and been translated into four languages.
  
  Haley now lives in London, UK, where she thrives on variety—she writes, acts, performs improv, does voiceovers, teaches artists in an array of online courses and hosts The Cost of Love podcast. The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale is her first book.

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  Joanna Klink

  Joanna Klink is an American poet. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and for many years taught in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana. Her new book, THE NIGHTFIELDS, was published July 7, 2020 by Penguin Books.

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  Charles M. Blow

  New York Times columnist and television commentator. Former graphics director of the Times and art director of National Geographic magazine. Graduate of Grambling State University. Father of three amazing children. Resident of Brooklyn.

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  Kiki Petrosino

  Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, is forthcoming from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.

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  Diane di Prima

  Diane di Prima was an American poet and member of the Beat Generation. She was San Francisco’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2011.

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  Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Vladimir Mayakovsky (Владимир Владимирович Маяковский) was born the last of three children in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now in Georgia) where his father worked as a forest ranger. His father was of Ukrainian Cossack descent and his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky spoke Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke primarily Russian at home. At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi, where he attended the local grammar school. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.
  
  In Moscow, Mayakovsky developed a passion for Marxist literature and took par

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  Jeddie Sophronius

  Jeddie Sophronius is the author of the poetry collections Interrogation Records: Poems, Happy Poems and Other Lies, Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting, a runner-up for Quarterly West's 2022 Chapbook Contest.
  
  A Chinese-Indonesian writer from Jakarta, they received their MFA from the University of Virginia, where they currently serve as a lecturer in English. The recipient of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com
  
  They currently live and teach in Charlottesville, VA. They divide their time between Indonesia and the United States.

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  Thom Gunn

  Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex, and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards.

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  Divya Victor

  Divya Victor is the author of Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, 2014, winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2015), Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922 (GaussPDF, 2014), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (GaussPDF, 2012), PUNCH (GaussPDF, 2011), and the Partial trilogy (Troll Thread, 2011-2012). Her chapbooks include Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and SUTURES (2009). Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, the reedition of bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire, Crux:

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  George Oppen

  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 later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He returned to poetry—and to the United States—in 1958, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

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  Ben Katchor

  Ben Katchor (born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY) is an American cartoonist. His comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer paints an evocative picture of a slightly surreal, historical New York City with a decidedly Jewish sensibility. Julius Knipl has been published in several book collections including Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay and The Beauty Supply District. Other serialized comics by Katchor include The Jew Of New York (collected and published as a graphic novel in 1998), The Cardboard Valise and Hotel & Farm. He regularly contributes comics and drawings to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Metropolis magazine.

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  Marilyn Hacker

  Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English.
  
  Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

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  Renato Rosaldo

  Renato Rosaldo is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the American Ethnological Society. He is the author of The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Culture and Truth and Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974, and two award-winning poetry collections, Diego Luna's Insider Tips and Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la Mujer Araña.

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  Gil Scott-Heron

  Gilbert Scott Heron was born in 1949. His mother was a librarian and his father a soccer player from Jamaica. In his youth Heron displayed both sporting prowess and academic ability (he won a place at Pennsylvania Lincoln University, like his role model Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance man). But he quit college after the first year to write his first novel, The Vulture (1970). While Heron was writing this the ferment of black politics and student radicalism was coming to a head, and his second novel The Nigger Factory (1972) reflects these developments.
  Heron has been more adventurous in his work as a musician and rapper.

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  Dean Young

  Dean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

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  Natalie Shapero

  Natalie Shapero is a professor of the practice of poetry at Tufts University. Her most recent poetry collection is Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), received the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship.

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  Michael Dumanis

  Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems, Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande). Born in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to the United States at the age of five. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Waxwing. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and teaches at Bennington College, where he also serves as editor of Bennington Review.

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  Aram Saroyan

  Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. There has been a resurgence of interest in his work in the 21st century, evidenced by the publication in 2007 of several previous collections reissued together as Complete Minimal Poems. He is the son of author William Saroyan and actress Carol Grace, and the father of Strawberry Saroyan.

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  Robert Pinsky

  Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
  wikipedia

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  Basil Bunting

  Born into a Quaker family, Bunting was educated at the Royal Grammar School there for two years. He then studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire. His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I, and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector, serving a sentence of more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. These events were to have an important role in his first major poem, Villon (1925). Villon was one of a rather rare set of complexly structured poems that Bunting labelled "sonatas," thus underlining the sonic qualities of his verse and recalling his love of music. After his release from p

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