photo courtesy of the Literary Estate of May Swenson

May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah, in 1913. She attended Utah State University, Logan, and received a bachelor's degree in 1939. She taught poetry at Bryn Mawr, the University of North Carolina, the University of California at Riverside, Purdue University and Utah State University and was an editor at New Directions publishers from 1959 to 1966.

Her poems appeared in Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, Carleton Miscellany, The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Parnassus and Poetry. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1980 to 1989. She died in Oceanview, Delaware, in 1989.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Another Animal (1954)
A Cage of Spines (1958)
To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (1963)
Poems to Solve (1966)
Half Sun Half Sleep (1967)
Iconographs (1970)
More Poems to Solve (1971)
New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978)
In Other Words (1987)
The Love Poems of May Swenson (1991)
Nature: Poems Old and New (1994)
May Out West (1996)

Prose

The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964)

Translation

Windows & Stones: Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (1972)