Lannan Foundation

Carolyn Forché

No one has worked harder to bring the brutal extremities of political life in the 20th century into the orbit of American poetry than Carolyn Forché, poet, translator, anthologist, and human rights activist.

Her 1982 volume, The Country Between Us, commemorates two years spent working with human rights advocates in El Salvador; it contains some of the most powerful poems of political violence and political commitment ever written in the United States.

Carolyn Forché Bio and Cross Links

Suzanne Gardinier

Louise Glück

Louise Glück says of writing, “[It] is not decanting of personality. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned.”

Glück was appointed the United States Poet Laureate in 2003. She is the author of numerous books of poetry including The Seven Ages, and The Wild Iris, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent publication is a chapbook called October, identifying with the season of autumn, the dark of it and the beauty of it.

Louise Glück Bio and Cross Links

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney’s poetry bears witness to Ireland’s complex, violent past and present, articulating the conflicts and tender mercies inherent in human experience. Born into a Catholic farming family in Northern Ireland in 1939, he has been a resident of the Irish Republic since 1972.

Since 1981 he has spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University, where he served as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory from 1984 to 1998, and is now the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence.

Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, uses all aspects of Irish culture, history, folklore, song, myth, and religion to write poetry that not only describes the Irish experience to the reader, but also allows the reader to feel the experience and emotions of the Irish people. He received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1990.

Seamus Heaney Bio and Cross Links

Donald Justice

Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. He and his family fled to the United States in 1964 from Indonesia, where his father was a political prisoner.

Mr. Lee has written two books of poetry, Rose and The City in Which I Love You, and a memoir, The Winged Seed.

Li-Young Lee Bio and Cross Links

Peter Levitt

Susan Mitchell

Herbert Morris

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist and children’s author. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in many parts of the world including Asia and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Naomi Shihab Nye Bio and Cross Links