Poet and critic Hayden Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1921. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1943 and a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. His first poetry collection, The Crow and the Heart, was published in 1959. He wrote about 30 books of poetry throughout his lifetime that addressed a wide range of subjects including madness, loneliness, death, and fragility of the natural world. Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry in 1996. He also wrote a novel entitled Appendix A. He was the poetry editor of Harper's from 1977 to 1983 and the advisory editor for The Hudson Review… from 1971 until his death on September 29, 2008 at the age of 87.
Galway Kinnell was born on February 1, 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. After earning his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. from the University of Rochester, Kinnell served in the U.S. Navy. Subsequently, he taught writing at many schools around the world, including universities in France, Australia, and Iran, and served as director of the creative writing programs at SUNY Binghamton and New York University. In addition to enriching the American literary landscape as a teacher, Kinnell has been a poet for more than 35 years. Although at first his poems were very traditional, his later poetry was written with a more free-style approach. Kinnell's poetry is drawn from his own… experience and from his inner self. He speaks of nature and man's relationship, death and living, and the experiences one gains from being alive. Kinnell's 12th collection of poems is entitled Imperfect Thirst; other collections include When One has Lived a Long Time, The Book of Nightmares, and Walking Down the Stairs. A former MacArthur Fellow, Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1983. He has also won the American Book Award and has served as the State Poet of Vermont.