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Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 1, 1887, and spent much of her youth in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909 she taught for four years at the Carlisle Indian School. Her poetry first appeared professionally in The Egoist and Poetry magazines in 1915 and she moved to New York City in 1918. Her first book, Poems, was issued in England by the Egoist Press in 1921. Observations, published three years later in America, received the Dial Award. From 1925 to 1929 she served as acting editor of The Dial, the preeminent American literary periodical. She moved to Brooklyn in 1929, where she lived for the next thirty-six years. In 1935 Selected Poems, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot, brought her work to the attention of a wider public. Three additional books of poetry were followed, in 1951, by her Collected Poems, which won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Among the many awards Marianne Moore received are the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for poetry, the Poetry Scoiety of America's Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and the National Medal for Literature, America's highest literary honor. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters since 1947, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. In 1967 she was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic, and in 1969 she received an honorary doctorate in literature from Harvard University, her sixteenth honorary degree. Marianne Moore died in New York City, in her eighty-fifth year, on February 5, 1972.

"Part of the body of durable poetry written in our time—in which an original sensibility and an alert intelligence and deep feeling have been engaged in maintaining the life of the English language." —T.S. Eliot

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John Ashbery is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including April Galleons (1987), and Flow Chart (1991), and a volume of art criticism, Reported Sightings (1989). His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. He has been named a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow, and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1989-90 he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He is currently Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Literature at Bard College.

"No one now writing poetry in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgements of time.... He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane." —Harold Bloom

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Carl Dennis is the author of nine books of poetry, including, Practical Gods, which in 2002 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Association for his contribution to American poetry. He lives in Buffalo, where he is Artist in Residence at the State University of New York, and is a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA Program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

"His acute observations about the private and public realms reach beyond mere statement to subtle levels of informed art." —Joseph Parisi

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Linda Bierds is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently The Seconds. Among her many awards are the PEN West Poetry Prize and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as fellowships from the Ingram Merrill, John Simon Guggenheim, Wolfers-O'Neill and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations. Her work has appeared widely, including in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The New Yorker, and Parnassus. She is on the faculty of the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

"The autobiography of her imagination would be only half as intense were the writing itself less beautiful and clear, less perfect to pitch." —Stanley Plumly