Paula Gunn Allen was born in 1939, in Cubero, New Mexico, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. She received her BA and MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of New Mexico. Her books include Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems, 1962–1995 (1997); Skins and Bones (1988); Shadow Country (1982); and The Blind Lion (1974). She is the editor of a number of books on Native American art, literature, and poetry, including Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989) as well as novels and nonfiction volumes on Native American traditions and womanhood. She has taught at San Francisco State University, the University of California–Berkeley, and the University of California–Los Angeles. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Native American Prize for Literature.

Lucie Brock-Broido was born in 1956 in Pittsburgh and raised there. She received her BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University and her MFA from Columbia University. Her books of poetry include Trouble in Mind (2004), The Master Letters (1995), and A Hunger (1988). Her awards and honors include the Wittner Bynner prize in poetry from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Brock-Broido has taught at Bennington College, at Princeton University, and at Harvard University as the director of the creative writing program and as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer. She is director of poetry in the writing division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and divides her time between New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. She attended Howard University and Fredonia State Teachers College. Her books of poetry include Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (2000), winner of the National Book Award; The Terrible Stories (1995), nominated for the National Book Award; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 (1987), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Two-Headed Woman (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize; and Good Times (1969). She has also written Generations: A Memoir (1976) and more than sixteen books for children. Her honors include an Emmy Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award. In 1999 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has served as poet laureate for the State of Maryland and is currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Toi Derricotte was born in Detroit in 1941. She holds a BA from Wayne State University and an MA from New York University. Her books of poetry include Tender (1997), Captivity (1989), Natural Birth (1983), and The Empress of the Death House (1978), as well as the memoir The Black Notebooks (1997). Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, a Pushcart Prize, a Poetry Committee Book Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from United Black Artists, Inc., and the Lucille Medmick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has been a visiting poet at many colleges and universities and is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she lives.

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. She received a BA from Miami University and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her books of poetry include American Smooth (2004); On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Selected Poems (1993); and Thomas and Beulah (1986), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She also has published short stories, a novel, and a verse drama and has edited The Best American Poetry 2000. Dove’s honors include the Heinz Award, a National Humanities Medal, an NAACP Great American Artist award, the Common Wealth Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dove served as U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995. From 1994 to 2000, she was a senator of Phi Beta Kappa; in 2006 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Denise Duhamel was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1961. She received a BFA from Emerson College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry including Two and Two (2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (1999), winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize; and Kinky (1997). Duhamel has also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on three volumes: Little Novels, Oyl, and Exquisite Politics. She is co editor, with Nick Carbó, of the anthology Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon and a coeditor of the collaboration anthology Saints of Hysteria with David Trinidad and Maureen Seaton. A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry. Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her husband, the poet Nick Carbó.

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950 and spent her youth in Italy. She attended New York University as an undergraduate and received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Overlord (2005); Swarm (2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The End of Beauty (1987); and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Marilyn Hacker was born in New York City in 1942. She received a BA from New York University. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Desesperanto: Poems 1999–2002 (2003); First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960–1979 (2003); Winter Numbers (1994), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Selected Poems, 1965–1990 (1994), which received the Poets’ Prize; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Going Back to the River (1990), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award; and Presentation Piece (1974), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. She also translated Venus Khoury-Ghata’s poetry, published in She Says (2003) and Here There Was Once a Country (2001). Hacker was editor of the Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994 and has received honors including the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She lives in New York City and Paris.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002); A Map to the Next World: Poems (2000); The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Secrets from the Center of the World (1989); She Had Some Horses (1983); and What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979). She also performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band, Poetic Justice. Her honors include the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Wittner Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Hawaii.

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay area in 1941. She received a BA from Harvard University. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author or coauthor of fourteen books of poetry, including The Beginner (2000), Happily (2000), Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999), The Cold of Poetry (1994), The Cell (1992), My Life (1980), Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978), and A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was editor of Tuumba Press, and since 1981 she has been coeditor of Poetics Journal. She is also the codirector of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. Her honors include a writing fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Fund for Poetry, and a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She recently received the sixty-sixth fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement at midcareer. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940 and attended Stanford University. She is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the novels Nod (1998) and Famous Questions (1989) and fiction for young adults, including The Race of the Radical (1985). Her books of poetry include Indivisible (2000), One Crossed Out (1997), and Robeson Street(1985); her Selected Poems (2000) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Other honors received include MacDowell Colony fellowships, a California Arts Council award for poetry, a National Poetry Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Village Voice Award for Fiction. She has taught at many institutions, including the University of California–San Diego, Bard College, and Mills College. She lives in La Jolla, California.

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston and attended the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Her books of poems include The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (1996), The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990). Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), a Times Literary Supplement International Book of the Year, and My Emily Dickinson (1985). Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry (1999), The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2 (1998). She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities. She was the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Myung Mi Kim was born in 1957 in Seoul, Korea. She received her BA from Oberlin College, her MA from Johns Hopkins University, and her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of several books, including Commons (2002), Dura (1998), The Bounty (1996), and Under Flag (1991). Her work has been included in the anthologies Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology and the Anthology of Asian American Writing. She is the recipient of Gertrude Stein awards for innovative North American poetry and a Fund for Poetry award, among others. She teaches at San Francisco State University.

Alice Notley was born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California. She received a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She married the poet Ted Berrigan in 1972. Notley’s numerous collections of verse include Disobedience (2001); Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry; The Descent of Alette (1996); Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993); At Night the States (1988); Parts of a Wedding (1986); Margaret and Dusty (1985); Sorrento (1984); How Spring Comes (1981), which received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Waltzing Matilda (1981); Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (1979); Alice Ordered Me To Be Made (1976); and 165 Meeting House Lane (1971). She has also published Coming After: Essays on Poetry (2005) and is editor, with her sons Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Poetry Center award, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She lives in Paris and edits the magazine Gare du Nord.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years she studied in the Old City in Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She received a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Nye is the author of numerous books, including You and Yours (2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002); Fuel (1998); Red Suitcase (1994); and Hugging the Jukebox (1982). She has written many volumes for children and has edited seven anthologies of poetry for young readers. Nye was a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award twice. She has also received four Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Wittner Bynner fellowship, and the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin. She travels widely, promoting international goodwill through the arts, and lives in San Antonio with the photographer Michael Nye and their son.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942. She studied at Stanford University and received a master’s degree from Columbia University. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first collection, Satan Says (1980), and the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead & the Living (1983). Her other books of poetry are Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004); Blood, Tin, Straw (1999); The Gold Cell (1997); The Wellspring (1995); and The Father (1992). Named New York State Poet in 1998, Olds teaches poetry workshops at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, along with a workshop at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She lives in New York City.

Molly Peacock was born in 1947 in Buffalo. She attended the State University of New York at Binghamton and Johns Hopkins University, where she received an MA in 1977. Her collections of poetry include Cornucopia (2002), Original Love (1995), Take Heart (1989), Raw Heaven (1984), and And Live Apart (1980). She is also an author of prose, including How to Read a Poem, and Start a Poetry Circle(1999) and her literary memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece (1998). She is the editor of the anthology The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (2001) and coeditor of Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses (1996). A president emerita of the Poetry Society of America, she was one of the originators of Poetry in Motion. Peacock has been a writer-in-residence and teacher at numerous universities and is currently a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s Brief Residency MFA Program and a lecturer at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y. She has received awards from the Danforth Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Peacock has performed her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, off Broadway and throughout North America. She lives in Toronto.

Anna Rabinowitz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her most recent volume of poetry is The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders (2006). Her book-length acrostic poem, Darkling: A Poem, has been adapted into an experimental multimedia music theater work by American Opera Projects. Rabinowitz’s other books include At the Site of Inside Out (1997), which won the Juniper Prize. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1989, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets’ Grimm, and Poetry after 9/11. Rabinowitz edits and publishes the literary journal American Letters & Commentary and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and was a Bunting Institute fellow at Radcliffe. Her books include Supernatural Love: Poems, 1978–1992 (2000), The Throne of Labdacus (2000), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), Portraits and Elegies (1986), and The Lamplit Answer (1985). Her awards include the Amy Lowell prize, the Rome Prize in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lavan Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She lives in Boston.

Maureen Seaton is a graduate of the College of New Rochelle and received an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Venus Examines Her Breast (2004), Little Ice Age (2001), and Furious Cooking (1996), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. She is a coeditor, with Denise Duhamel and David Trinidad, of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry and a cocollaborator, with Niki Nolin, on “Literal Drift,” “Chaosity,” and the forthcoming “Cave of the Time-Stream,” Web-based hypermedia collages. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council grant, and two Pushcarts, she directs the creative writing program at the University of Miami.

Anne Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, in 1945 and grew up on MacDougal Street in New York City. She received her BA from Bennington College. From 1966 until 1978 she ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Afterward she founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, with Allen Ginsberg. Waldman’s honors include the Dylan Thomas Memorial Award and the Shelley Memorial Award for poetry, and she is a two-time winner of the International Poetry Championship Bout in Taos. She has published over forty books of poetry, including In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2003 (2003), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), Kill or Cure (1994), Iovis: All is Full of Jove (1993), Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems 1966– 1988 (1989), and Fast Speaking Woman (1974). Her work can also be found in numerous films, videos, and sound recordings. She is editor of several anthologies including The Beat Book (1996) and The World Anthology: Poems from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1969). She has cotranslated Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (1996), a book of traditional Buddhist scripture originally in Sanskrit and Prakrit. Waldman is the director of the MFA writing and poetics program at the Naropa Institute and divides her time between Boulder and Greenwich Village.

Susan Wheeler was born in 1955 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has a BA from Bennington College and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are Ledger, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (2005), and the novel RecordPalace(2005). Her first book, Bag o’ Diamonds (1994), won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1994. She is also the author of Smokes (1998) and Source Codes (2001). Her awards include the Grolier Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Guggenheim fellowship, and she has been included in many volumes of Best American Poetry. She has been an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The New School, Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, among others. She lives in the New York area.