photo: Robert Turney

Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California, in 1937. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Thom Gunn, Josephine Miles, and Tom Parkinson. She has published more than forty collections of poems, including the four books that constitute her series "The Archaeology of Movies and Books"—Argonaut Rose (1998), The Emerald City of Las Vegas (1995), Jason the Sailor (1993), and Medea the Sorceress (1991)—all published by Black Sparrow Press; Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 (1988), which won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; and The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13 (1984). She has also published four books of essays: Toward a New Poetry (1979), Variations on a Theme (1976), Creating a Personal Mythology (1975), and Form Is an Extension of Content (1972). Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Diane Wakoski lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where since 1976 she has taught at Michigan State University.