Author Bios

Betsy Wheeler is a contemporary American poet whose work explores the inner life with lyric intensity, psychological depth, and a formal attentiveness that rewards careful reading. Her poetry engages the tensions between consciousness and the world, between the desire for clarity and the persistence of ambiguity, in ways that feel both intellectually rigorous and emotionally…

Erika Meitner is a contemporary American poet whose work maps the intersections of American landscape, consumer culture, faith, and grief with a documentary energy and lyric intensity that have earned her wide recognition. Born and raised in New York, Meitner has spent much of her adult life in the American South and Mid-Atlantic region, and…

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was one of the central figures of the confessional poetry movement and one of the most powerful and controversial American poets of the twentieth century. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, she grew up in a prosperous family and showed an early gift for words and performance. After an early marriage,…

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is widely regarded as the father of American free verse and one of the most transformative figures in the history of world literature. Born on Long Island, New York, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn and worked as a printer, journalist, and essayist before publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass in…

Despy Boutris is a contemporary American poet whose work has garnered significant attention in literary journals and among readers drawn to poetry that explores queer identity, family, landscape, and longing with lyric clarity and emotional depth. Boutris grew up in California, and the landscapes of the American West — its light, its heat, its particular…

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, performance artist, and scholar whose work stands at the radical intersection of conceptual poetics, Black feminist theory, and the phenomenology of the body. Martin grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and has spoken about her upbringing in an environment shaped by racial violence and social precarity as a formative…

Jane Satterfield is a contemporary American poet and essayist known for the formal elegance, historical range, and personal urgency of her work. Raised in the United Kingdom and the United States, Satterfield brings a transatlantic perspective to her poetry, which engages questions of family, loss, war, and cultural memory with both scholarly depth and lyric…

Dana Levin is a significant voice in contemporary American poetry, recognized for her visionary intensity, syntactic ambition, and willingness to engage the largest questions — about mortality, consciousness, the natural world, and the fate of civilization — with both philosophical rigor and lyric abandon. She grew up in the Mojave Desert of California and studied…

Paisley Rekdal is a celebrated contemporary American poet, essayist, and critic whose work occupies a distinctive space at the intersection of personal history, cultural memory, and formal innovation. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, to a Norwegian-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Rekdal has consistently drawn on her mixed-race heritage, her experiences as a woman…

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and Philip Glass (born 1937) represent two of the most transformative artistic forces of the twentieth century, and their collaboration produced some of the most distinctive work at the intersection of poetry and music. Ginsberg, the Beat Generation’s preeminent poet, brought to the partnership his decades of engagement with breath-based prosody, Buddhist…