Born in San Francisco, Calif., Robert Hass received his undergraduate degree from St. Mary's College and his masters and Ph.D. from Stanford University. After graduating, Hass wrote his first collection of poetry, Field Guide, which went on to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973. Hass's second collection, Praise, won the Williams Carlos Williams Award in 1979. Selected by the Library of Congress as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1995-96, Hass has taught writing at the University of California at Berkeley since 1989. Hass has co-translated several volumes of poetry by Nobel Laureate and fellow colleague Czeslaw Milosz and is the editor of The Essential Haiku.
John Hollander has edited several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes, including "Robert Frost", "Christmas Poems", "War Poems", "Marriage Poems", "Animal Poems", & "Garden Poems". He is the A. Bartlett Biamatti Professor of English at Yale University, & the author of numerous books of poetry & criticism. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1990.
Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington on December 10, 1924. At 17, she had a poem, When You Are Distant, published in The New Yorker. She received a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945 and afterward did graduate work in Chinese at Columbia University. In 1959, she helped found the journal Poetry Northwest and served as its editor until 1965. Her first collection of poetry, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961. Her other collections include Knock Upon Silence and Harping On. Her best known work was the five-part cycle Pro Femina. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for her collection Yin and a Poetry Society of America Frost Medal in 1988. A skilled… translator, she translated works from Urdu, Macedonian, Yiddish, and Chinese, including the Tang poet Tu Fu and the a modern woman poet Shu Ting. Kizer died from complications of dementia on October 9, 2014 at the age of 89.
Nathaniel Mackey, recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award, is the author of Eroding Witness (1985), School of Udhra (1993), Whatsaid Serif (1998), Bedouin Hornbook (1986), and Djbot Baghosus's Run (1993), as well as Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993). He teaches literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.