photo courtesy Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske-Dukes was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945. She received her M.S. in 1970 from the State University of California at San Francisco. She has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Virginia. She is the founding director of the PhD Program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

Muske-Dukes is the author of seven books of poetry and three novels. Her first book of poems, Camouflage, was published in 1975 in the Pitt Poetry Series. Her most recent volume of poetry was Sparrow (2003), a National Book Award finalist. She has also written two collections of essays: Women & Poetry and Married to the Icepick Killer: a Poet in Hollywood. Among her awards are the 1979 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America, a 1981 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill grant, a Witter/Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, and several Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have been widely anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, One Hundred Great Poems by Women, MotherSongs, and many others. A regular reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and a poetry columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she presently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.