154 articles
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer, born John Lester Spicer, was an American poet of the San Francisco Renaissance who assembled his poems into "books" and described poetry as "dictation."
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey (1923–1997), American poet, novelist, and critic; National Book Award winner for Buckdancer's Choice, Library of Congress poetry consultant, and author of the best-selling novel Deliverance.
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (1926–1995) was an American poet who won two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, best known for the Ouija-inspired epic The Changing Light at Sandover.
James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was an American poet, critic, and diplomat, a Fireside Poet from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler (1923–1991) was an American poet, novelist, and art critic, a central member of the New York School who won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), American poet, lyricist, diplomat, lawyer, and NAACP leader; wrote 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' (1900), the Black National Anthem, and led the NAACP as its first Black executive secretary.
James Whitcomb Riley
James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet (1849-1916), was an American dialect poet and performer from Greenfield, Indiana, author of "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Old Swimmin' Hole," and namesake of Riley Hospital for Children.
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024) was an American poet, translator, and anthologist who founded ethnopoetics, the study of oral and tribal poetries, and published more than eighty books over a sixty-year career.
Jim Carroll
Jim Carroll, full name James Dennis Carroll, was an American poet and musician whose 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries became a 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison (1937–2016), American poet, novelist, and essayist from Grayling, Michigan; author of Legends of the Fall, Plain Song, and food writing; considered himself a poet first.
John Ashbery
John Ashbery (1927–2017) was an American poet of the New York School whose collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won three major awards in 1976.
John Berryman
John Berryman, born John Allyn Smith, Jr., was an American confessional poet whose 385-poem sequence The Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was an American poet, editor, and abolitionist from Massachusetts, one of the Fireside Poets, whose long narrative poem Snow-Bound (1866) sold twenty thousand copies.
Joy Davidman
Joy Davidman (Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, 1915–1960), American poet and novelist, Yale Younger Poets winner for Letter to a Comrade; wife of C. S. Lewis from 1956, subject of Shadowlands, and author of Smoke on the Mountain.
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo (born 1951) is an American poet and musician of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who served as US Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022.
Joyce Kilmer
Joyce Kilmer (Alfred Joyce Kilmer, 1886–1918), American poet and journalist, author of "Trees"; served as a sergeant in the Fighting 69th, killed by a German sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne, awarded the posthumous French Croix de Guerre.
Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), American poet, abolitionist, and suffragist, wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (1862), co-founded the American Woman Suffrage Association with Lucy Stone, launched Mother's Peace Day, and was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet and playwright of the New York School alongside John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, who taught at Columbia University for over 40 years.
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, essayist, and translator central to the San Francisco Renaissance; he emceed the 1955 Six Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg first performed "Howl."
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes (James Mercer Langston Hughes, 1901–1967) was an American poet, playwright, novelist, and columnist, a leading Harlem Renaissance figure known for jazz- and blues-inflected poems like "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," The Weary Blues, and "Harlem."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was an American poet and activist who co-founded City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco. He was tried for obscenity in 1957 for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
Lee Maracle
Lee Maracle, born Marguerite Aline Carter, was a Stó:lō Canadian writer and activist whose 1975 debut Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel was among Canada's first published Indigenous fiction.
Li-Young Lee (李立扬)
Li-Young Lee (李立扬), born 1957 in Jakarta, is an American poet of Rose, The City in Which I Love You, and The Invention of the Darling; refugee son of Mao's physician, 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner.
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) was an American poet of the Objectivist circle around Louis Zukofsky who wrote short, spare, sound-driven poems while living on Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin.
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Lorna Dee Cervantes (born 1954) is an American poet, a major voice in Chicana literature, known for Emplumada (1981), which won the American Book Award, and From the Cables of Genocide (1991).
Louis Untermeyer
Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), American poet, critic, and prolific anthologist of Modern American Poetry; former New York jeweler, What's My Line panelist removed in 1951, and Library of Congress poetry consultant 1961-1963.
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) was an American avant-garde poet from New York City's Lower East Side, best known for the long poem "A" and for coining the term "objectivists" for 1930s modernist poets.
Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan (1897–1970) was an American poet and literary critic who reviewed poetry for The New Yorker for 38 years and became the first woman Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress.
Louise Glück
Louise Glück (1943–2023), American poet of austere, plainspoken lyricism; author of Firstborn (1968), The Wild Iris (1992, Pulitzer), Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014, National Book Award); 2020 Nobel laureate, US poet laureate 2003–2004, Yale professor.
Luci Tapahonso
Luci Tapahonso, born 1953, is a Navajo poet from Shiprock, New Mexico, who served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation from 2013 to 2015.