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Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. However, special citations for poetry were presented in 1918 and 1919.
This list is based on the website for the Pulitzer Prizes. Years link to corresponding "[year] in...
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W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwin (New York City, September 30, 1927) is an American poet. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's writing...
Philip Schultz
Philip Schultz (b. 1945 in Rochester, New York) is an American poet, and the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including...
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Robert Hass
Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941 San Francisco) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and...
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey (born 1966) is an American poet, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in...
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Claudia Emerson
Claudia Emerson (born January 13, 1957) is an American poet who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife. She is a professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in...
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Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser (born 25 April 1939) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.
Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and the MA at the...
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Franz Wright
Franz Wright (born March 18, 1953) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at Oberlin College (1977), Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004 for his book Walking to Martha's Vineyard (ISBN 0-375...
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Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon (born 20 June 1951) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland as well as an educator and academic at Princeton University.
Muldoon's poetry is known for his difficult, sly, allusive style, casual use of...
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Carl Dennis
Carl Dennis (born September 17, 1939), an American poet and educator, wrote Practical Gods, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 17, 1939, Dennis attended Oberlin College and the University of...
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Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn (born 1939 in New York City) is an American poet. Dunn has written fourteen collections of poetry, and has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours. One of his poems, called "The Sacred" was written in...
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Mark Strand
Mark Strand (born 11 April 1934) is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.
Strand was...
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Charles Wright
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet.
Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, and attended Davidson College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Wright has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in...
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham (born May 9, 1950) is an American poet and the editor of numerous volumes of poetry.
Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including her most recent, Sea Change (Ecco, 2008). She has also edited two anthologies,...
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Philip Levine
Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Louise Glück
Louise Elisabeth Glück (born 22 April 1943) is an American poet of German heritage. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000...
James Tate
James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943) is an American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri and is a professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts.
Tate's writing...
Charles Simic
Dušan “Charles” Simić (Serbian: Душан "Чарлс" Симић) (IPA: [/ˈtʃ͡ɑːɻls ˈʂimitɕ͡/]) (born 9 May 1938) is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the...
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (born 1 March 1921) is an American poet. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.
Wilbur was...
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born 28 August 1952) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1993, the first African American to be appointed, and received a second special appointment in...
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Henry S. Taylor
Henry S. Taylor (born 1942) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet and author of over 15 books of poetry.
Taylor was born on 21 June 1942 in rural Loudoun County, Virginia. He went to high school at George School in Newtown, PA. He graduated from...
Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Ashley Kizer (born December 10, 1925) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism.
"Kizer reaches into mythology in poems like “Semele Recycled”; into politics, into feminism,...
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) is an American poet.
Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. She briefly attended both Ohio State University and...
Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell (born February 1, 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island) is one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by...
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author.
Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria...
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James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler (9 November 1923 – 12 April 1991) was a major American poet in the late 20th century. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School of poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara,...
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Donald Justice
Donald Justice (born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 - died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. He graduated from the University of Miami and went on to teach for many years at the Iowa Writers'...
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He received the 1947...
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Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (29 February 1920 – 5 July 1991) was American poet, twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, and again from 1988 to 1990. He received the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for...
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist (if deeply emotional) lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic...
John Ashbery
John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets. In an article on Elizabeth Bishop in his Selected...
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep...
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Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin (born 6 June 1925) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981-1982.
Born in Philadelphia, Kumin, the daughter of Jewish parents, attended Catholic kindergarten...
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James Wright
James Arlington Wright (December 13, 1927 – March 25, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale...
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George Oppen
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 - July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the...
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Anthony Hecht
Anthony Evan Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the...
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Anne Sexton
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Richard Eberhart
Richard Ghormley Eberhart (April 5, 1904 – June 9, 2005) was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. He received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems: 1930-1965 and a...
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.) (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the...
Louis Simpson
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William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a...
Alan Dugan
Alan Dugan (February 12, 1923-September 3, 2003) was an American poet. His poetry is known for its plain and direct language, though it is supported by technical skill; it is generally trenchant and ironic in its criticism of American life and...
Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 - February 22, 1978) was an U.S. writer of children's books and poet about the positive aspects of suburban life.
McGinley was born in Ontario, Oregon. At age 3, her family moved to Colorado, and on to Ogden, Utah...
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William De Witt Snodgrass
William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) was an American poet under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons. He won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
William De Witt Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and...
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Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (pronounced /ˈkjuːnɪts/) (29 July 1905 – 14 May 2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.
Kunitz was born in...
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (8 February 1911 – 6 October 1979) was an American poet and writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artist's retreat in Great...
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in...
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Huebner Roethke (pronounced /ˈrɛtkə/ RET-keh) (May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963) was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in...
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish (7 May 1892 – 20 April 1982) was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernist school of poetry. He has received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
MacLeish was born in Glencoe,...
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.
Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle...
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg ...
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to...
Peter Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006), was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and influential political thinker, as well as a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for five decades.
Viereck was born in New York, the...
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W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/) who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of...
