Poet and critic Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College. She has spent a great deal of time studying in China. Influenced by the Chinese belief in yin and yang, Kizer writes about life's dualities - old and young, past and present, male and female. Exploring the woman poet's dilemma, women writers' contradictory position as "handmaidens/To our own goddess", Kizer also celebrates the paradoxes felt by women in a modern world. She has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1985) and a Poetry Society of America Frost Medal (1988). A skilled translator, she has done translations from Urdu, Macedonian, Yiddish, and, most notably, from Chinese - the great… Tang poet Tu Fu and the love poems of a modern woman poet, Shu Ting.