Poets
A. R. Ammons
Born in a farmhouse near Whiteville, North Carolina, the son of a tobacco farmer, Archie Randolph Ammons served on a Navy destroyer escort in World War II. He studied biology and chemistry at Wake...
Other
European |
Aaron Kramer
Among progressive modern American poets working with social and political themes and using traditional forms, Aaron Kramer may well be the single most accomplished figure. From his first protest...
Modernist
European |
Adrian C. Louis
Born and raised in Nevada, Louis is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Indian tribe. He was educated at Brown University, where he also went on to receive an M.A. in creative writing. A...
Other
Native |
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich grew up in Baltimore and was educated at Radcliffe College. After early work that had the controlled elegance and formality characteristic of some poets in the first years of the...
Feminist
European |
Albert Goldbarth
Albert Goldbarth was born in Chicago and educated at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the University of Iowa. He taught for a decade at the University of Texas at Austin and now...
Other
European |
Alberto Rios
Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born in the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. His mother was British and his father Mexican. Ríos was educated at University of Arizona and now teaches at...
Other
Latino/a |
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Born Alice Ruth Moore, in New Orleans, of mixed African American, Native American, and European ancestry, Dunbar-Nelson was educated at Straight College (now Dillard University). Her Cornell...
Harlem Renaissance
African, European, Native |
Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg was at once one of the major poets of the second half of the twentieth century and a public figure who entreated his country by way of his poetry to realize its full democratic potential...
Beat
European |
Allen Tate
Tate was born John Orley Allen Tate in Winchester, Kentucky, and educated at Vanderbilt University. His roommate was Robert Penn Warren. After active participation in the Agrarian movement that...
Fugitive
European |
Amiri Baraka
Born Everett Leroy Jones to a middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a postal employee and social worker, Amiri Baraka was educated at Rutgers, Howard, and Columbia universities....
Black Arts
No Data |
Amy Lowell
Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, of a family long influential in New England commerce, history, and culture. Her ancestors founded Lowell, Massachusetts; George Washington had...
Modernist
European |
Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo was born and grew up in Chicago of Aztec and Mexican ancestry. She was educated at Northern Illinois University and the University of Chicago, thereafter earning a Ph.D. at the...
Other
Latino/a, Native |
Andrew Hudgins
Andrew Hudgins was born in Killeen, Texas, as part of a military family. That entailed relocating through the South repeatedly while he was growing up. Some of that comes through in his verse...
Other
European |
Angelina Weld Grimké
Angelina Weld Grimké's troubled family history almost willfully theatricalizes key themes of America's racial history. Her father Archibald was the child of a South Carolina slaveholder and a...
Harlem Renaissance
African |
Anita Endrezze
Anita Endrezze was born in Long Beach, California, of Yaqui and European ancestry. An artist as well as a poet and short story writer, her paintings and illustrations have been reproduced in a...
Other
European, Native |
Anne Sexton
Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, the child of a wool merchant, Sexton's family lived in Boston suburbs and spent the summers on Squirrel Island, Maine. She married Alfred Sexton in...
Confessional
European |