Adrienne Rich (1929) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at Radcliffe College. In 1953 she married Alfred Conrad, an economist at Harvard, with whom she had three sons. During the 1960s Rich and Conrad lived in New York City, where they were active in radical politics and the antiwar movement. The marriage ended in 1970, that same year Conrad committed suicide. In 1976 Rich entered into a relationship with Michelle Cliff, with whom she edited the lesbian-feminist journal Sinister Wisdom. She has taught at, among other schools, Douglass College and Stanford University; she now lives in California. In addition to numerous widely acclaimed collections of poetry, she has published influential prose works combining autobiography with history and anthropology. Rich’s poetry has mirrored her biography in its shifts of content and style. The poems in her first book , A Change of World (1951), employed meter and emphasized formal qualities, but as Rich became political active and began to write more directly about her experiences as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew such constructions gave way to a looser, freer style, and her “quiet” and “ respectful” tone to a tenser, angrier one. She strove also to convey a sense of immediacy, even urgency. Her intelligent and innovative portrayals of women have contributed significantly to the feminist movement. Her poetry is both subjective and political, and it establishes a coherent point of view, a feminist identity and poetic vision which become part of the composite reality of a community. Her poetry changes the way we perceive and experience the world. Her works include The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-83 (1984), On lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979), Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986), and Dark Fields of the Republic 1991-1995 (1995).

     Allen Ginsberg (1926) was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Columbia University. After spending much time in Greenwich Village with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, & other Beat writers, he moved to San Francisco, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press published Howl & Other Poems its title poem functioning as condemnation of bourgeois culture, an introduction to the emergent counterculture, a celebration of sexuality, & a manifesto for the Beat movement. Read More...

    Amiri Baraka (1934) was born LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey. He earned a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A from Columbia University. From 1954 until 1956 he lived in the United States Air Force. Since then he taught at, among other schools, the New School for Social Research and Columbia University and has devoted himself to various experimental artistic ventures and radical political causes. Read More...

    W. H. Auden (1907-1973), British-born poet, was educated at Oxford. Deeply feeling the impact of the early thirties’ unemployment in England, he and his friends developed a social conscience which resembled communism, Look Stranger! (1936) is the collection of poems that secured his position as a leading left-wing poet. Read More...

     Cynthia Zarin (1959) was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. She was educated at Harvard College & Columbia University. A staff writer at The Now Yorker from 1985 until 1994, she currently teaches at Princeton University & lives in New York City, where she is a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Read More...

     Cathy Song (1955) a descendant of Korean immigrants, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in Wahiawa, a village on the island of Oahu. She was educated at the University of Hawaii, Wellesley College, and Boston University, and her first book, Picture Bride (1982), was published in the Yale series of Younger Poets. Read More...

     Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was born in Ilford, Essex (England), and educated at home. After working as a nurse in London during World War II, she immigrated to the United States in 1948. From 1956 to 1959 she lived in Mexico. She then taught at, among other schools, Stanford University. In addition to poetry, she published two collections of prose. Read More...

    Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Welsh poet. Born in Swansea, he was the son of a schoolmaster. He worked for a time as a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post and established himself with the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934, in which year he moved to London, later settling permanently back in Wales at Laugharne. Read More...

     Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father’s death in 1911 and her mother’s permanent hospitalization for mental illness in 1917, Bishop lived with relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. She was educated at Vassar College, and while there Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore, who recognized her promise and became her mentor. Read More...

     Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. For one year she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now College), in nearby South Hadley, then withdrew and returned to Amherst. Her adult life was as short on external incident as it was long on imagination. Dickinson lived at her family home in Amherst form 1848 on, she rarely received visitors, and in her mature years she never went out. Read More...

    Langston Hughes (1902-67), born in Missouri is a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He led a nomadic life in the U.S. and Europe until he began his prolific literary career with The Weary Blues (1926), poems on black themes in jazz rhythms and idiom, whose success made possible his college career at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. His concern with his race, mainly in an urban setting is evident in his works, as is his social consciousness. Read More...