photo: Jeanne C. Finley

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988.

Laux is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), Smoke (2000), What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.

About Laux's work, the poet Tony Hoagland has said, "Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion."

Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.