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Poet
Amy Clampitt
B. 1920 D. 1994
Amy Clampitt was born in Iowa in 1920 and grew up on the 300-acre farm owned by her Quaker grandparents in New Providence. She spent much of her childhood exploring the countryside which, coupled with the pleasures of naming and…
Poet
Caroline Caddy
B. 1944
Caroline Caddy was born in Perth, Western Australia, 1944 and spent her childhood in the United States of America and Japan. Since then Caroline has lived much of her life in Western Australia, where she raised two children. Caddy’s earliest…
Poet
Jane Duran
B. 1944
Jane Duran (b. 1944) is a writer whose work is often preoccupied with memory and exile. Born in Cuba, she grew up in the USA and Chile, the daughter of an American mother and a Spanish father who met after…
Poet
Kelly Grovier
B. 1968
Kelly Grovier (b. 1968) grew up in America and was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. He came to study at Oxford University after winning a British Marshall scholarship, and now teaches English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth…
Poet
John Montague
B. 1929 D. 2016
John Montague (b.1929, New York), the author of many books of poetry, stories, memoirs and essays, has been called “the greatest Irish poet of his generation” by Derek Mahon. Born to Irish parents in America, he returned to Ireland at…
Poet
Dan Burt
B. 1942
Dan Burt’s poems offer the reader a dual perspective on American culture, drawing on the poet’s personal experience of being both an insider and an outsider. The son of Jewish immigrants, Burt grew up in the tough environs of South…
Poet
August Kleinzahler
B. 1949
August Kleinzahler has been described as ‘an authentically American voice’. A review in the Economist of his fourth collection Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow said: “[the poems] twitch and jerk and snap their fingers at you… High and low vocabularies…
Poet
Philip Levine
B. 1934 D. 2015
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography Levine deals with his experiences as a factory worker, his family and friends,…
Poet
Louise Bogan
B. 1897 D. 1970
Born in Maine in 1897, Louise Bogan was the daughter of a mill worker and a mentally and emotionally unstable mother. Her childhood was restless: as the Bogans moved from one New England town to the next, May Bogan indulged…
Poet
Gwendolyn Brooks
B. 1917 D. 2000
Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in Chicago in a poor yet stable and loving family. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother a teacher and classically trained pianist. Brooks was thirteen when her first…
Poet
Allen Tate
B. 1899 D. 1979
Youngest of three sons, Allen Tate was born in Kentucky in 1899. His father was a businessman whose interests forced the family to move home up to three times a year, prompting Tate to later write: “we might as well…
Poet
Li-Young Lee
B. 1957
Li-Young Lee draws on his Chinese-American heritage in his poems, in particular his early experience of exile and migration. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, the son of Chinese parents exiled there having fallen foul of the Communist authorities. Lee’s…
Poet
Yvor Winters
B. 1900 D. 1968
Yvor Winters (b. 1900) was notorious in his lifetime for his recalcitrant literary criticism which rejected modernism in favour of reason in poetry. His own poetry, after a youthful dalliance with imagism, similarly stands outside the mainstream of poetic developments…
Poet
Elizabeth Bishop
B. 1911 D. 1979
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) at the time of her death was respected as a “writer’s writer” on account of her technical mastery and exemplary patience and dedication to her craft. Since then her reputation has risen steadily until she has become…
Poet
Rodney Jones
B. 1950
Rodney Jones, born half way through the twentieth century, grew up in rural Alabama in a world little changed from that of a hundred years before. It was a world he describes as “essentially feudal, agrarian, unelectrified” where “horses passed…
Poet
Carolyn Forché
B. 1950
Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit in 1950, her mother was a Czech-American journalist, her father a tool and die maker. Forché calls herself a ‘junk-heap Catholic’ – she is perpetually drawn to issues of social justice, and describes her…
Poet
Mark Strand
B. 1934 D. 2014
Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island, Canada and grew up in the United States. He was a shy dreamy child, and claimed not to have been very bright at school. When he was a year old,…
Poet
Gerald Stern
B. 1925 D. 2022
Son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Gerald Stern grew up in Pittsburgh, in a house with no books. It wasn’t as if being a writer was discouraged, he says, it just wasn’t considered something that anyone in his family would…