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A self-taught poet born in Depew, New York to working class parents, Lucille Clifton began writing at an early age. She cultivated her spare and powerful verse while attending Fredonia State Teachers College in the mid-1950s. Clifton often used her minimalist style to address traditional themes: family, relationships, and strength through adversity. Writer Helen Houston observes that Clifton's poetry brings to light the qualities that keep us alive as well as "the belief that we have the ability to make things better." Clifton's talent was recognized early in her career. Her first volume of poems, *Good Times*, was heralded by the *New York Times* as one of the best books of 1969. Clifton served as the state of Maryland's Poet Laureate from 1974 until 1985, and received numerous awards, including the National Book Award in 1999. Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of 73.

Adam Haslett is the author of *You Are Not A Stranger Here*, a short story collection, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and won the PEN/Winship Award. His work has appeared in *The New Yorker*, *The Nation*, *Zoetrope*, and *Best American Short Stories* as well as National Public Radio's *Selected Shorts*. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Yale Law school and has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. He lives in New York City, where he works part-time as a legal consultant.

Stephen Benatar was born in London in 1937. He has taught English at the University of Bordeaux, lived in Southern California, been a schoolteacher, an umbrella salesman, a hotel porter, and an employee of the Forestry Commission. He began writing as a child, but did not publish his first book, *The Man on the Bridge*, until he was 44. Subsequent works include *Wish Her Safe at Home*, *When I Was Otherwise*, *Recovery, Letters for a Spy*, and *Two on a Tiger and Stars*, a book for young readers. *Wish Her Safe at Home* was a runnerup for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Benatar has four grown children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, John.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of numerous previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. *The Sea* won the UK's Booker Prize in 2005. Mr Banville lives in Dublin.

Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. Describing her decision to leave the poetry world shortly after publishing her first poem in 1973, she told reviewer Rose Scolari, "I felt that I'd never make much of a poet if I didn't know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being." Hirshfield spent the next eight years studying Zen Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center. She returned to writing and teaching in the early 1980s and has since published several collections of poetry, including *Of Gravity & Angels, After,* and *Given Sugar, Given Salt*, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hirshfield's many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA writing seminars.

A long-time resident of Wayland, Massachusetts, Linda Hirsch is a photographer, curator and psychologist. She has also been a practicing photojournalist since the late 1970s, when she studied with Georgia Litwack at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, and later Ulrike Welsch and Stephen Benton at Harvard University. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including "Cuba: Hay Luz y Sombra" at Panopticon Gallery, Waltham, "Montuno: Cuban Call & Response" at The Center for the Arts in Natick (TCAN), and "Artists for Survival" at Framingham State College. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Anne Frank House, Netherlands, and the archives of His Highness the Dalai Lama and the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Stanford University. Hirsch continues to return to Cuba regularly. Image courtesy of Gary B. Hirsch.

Yusef Komunyakaa grew up in the deep south during the dawn of the civil rights movement. He served a tour of duty in Viet Nam, where he was also a writer and the managing editor for the military newspaper, the *Southern Cross*. He began writing poetry several years after he returned to the US. By 1979, at the age of 32, Komunyakaa had earned a BA, an MA, and an MFA, and had published two collections of poems, *Dedications & Other Darkhorses* and *Lost in the Bonewheel Factory.* Komunyakaa won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for *Neon Vernacular*. He is the senior distinguished poet in the graduate writing program at NYU.

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Ted Kooser spent 35 years in the insurance industry, earning his master of arts degree from the University of Nebraska and writing poems every morning before he left for the office. Now one of the country's most highly regarded poets, he is widely admired for his simple, straightforward style and the discovery of beauty in ordinary things. To help bring poetry to a wider audience, Kooser has created the American Life in Poetry project. This free service provides newspapers and web sites with poetry by contemporary American poets, and includes descriptions of the poems by Kooser himself. Kooser served as United States Poet Laureate from 2004 through 2006 and his many honors include a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for his collection of poems, *Delights & Shadows* and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Having retired from insurance work in 1999, Kooser is currently a presidential professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Born in the Bronx in 1932, Linda Pastan draws on experiences of daily life and of nature to create direct poems in a spare and engaging voice. Family experience--ordinary stories of husband and wife, of child and parent--are transformed in her poems to prisms for deep human themes, loss, growth, and the fragility of life. Pastan is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, given for lifetime achievement. For many years, she has been associated with the Breadloaf Writers Conference.

One of Stanley Kunitz's greatest loves was gardening. "It's the way things are," he once said, "death and life inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil." Kunitz was 99 years old when he published his last book in 2005. He died the following year. He received many awards for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Robert Frost Medal. He also served two terms as US poet laureate (1974-76 and 2000-01), as well as New York state poet laureate (1987-89). Kunitz lived, worked, and gardened for many summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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