Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, of a family long influential in New England commerce, history, and culture. Her ancestors founded Lowell, Massachusetts; George Washington had appointed one a judge; others founded the Lowell textile mills. But the family lineage also included scholars and educators and the poet James Russell Lowell. Largely self-educated and more than slightly self-assured, she turned to writing poetry seriously in her thirties, publishing her first book in 1912.

Charles Edward Anson Markham was born in Oregon City, in the Oregon Territory, but his mother took him to a farm at Suisun, California, in 1856. The farm was halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco; Markham lived in California, where he became a schoolteacher, until moving to New York's Staten Island at the turn of the century and publishing a number of volumes of poetry thereafter.

With its concise and telling graveyard epitaphs, Masters's 1915 collection, Spoon River Anthology, established his reputation and remains his best-known work. Born and raised in a small town in Illinois, his first and last volumes of poetry focus on the life of his native Midwest. Yet he also took up other subjects and used a variety of verse forms in the course of his career, meanwhile working as a lawyer and writing biographies of Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. See especially Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition (1992). 

Born in Rockland, Maine, Millay was educated at Vassar. In 1917, she moved to New York's Greenwich Village and joined the revolutionary mix of politics, modernism, and sexual experimentation that typified the community. Her poem "First Fig" is usually taken as the signature poem of an ecstatically romantic mode of writing, but it is offered here as an emblem of the more risky mix of commitments that shaped her life.

Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, Momaday is well known as a poet, novelist (House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain), painter, playwright, and storyteller. Although his work is centered in Native American culture and history, he has written poetry about a variety of subjects, including poems about nature partly shaped by a Native American vision. His literary influences are still wider, as is apparent when he writes in rhymed syllabics. Some of his literary works include his line drawings and paintings, which have been exhibited a number of times.

Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Carlisle Commercial College. She shared a house with her mother all her life, much of it working on a series of jobs in the New York area, but always focusing on writing. Notably, her use of quotation in her poems is as elaborate as that of T.S. Eliot, but to quite different purposes. If Eliot aimed for magisterial allusiveness, Moore aimed for something more complex and subversive—to model the cultural constitution of knowledge and understanding.

Born Thylias Rebecca Brasier into a working-class family in Cleveland, Ohio, Moss's mother was a maid and her father was a recapper for the Cardinal Tire Company. She enrolled at Syracuse University but left when she found the racial tension there unpleasant. She married John Moss in 1973, raised two sons, and then returned to school, earning degrees from Oberlin College and the University of New Hampshire. Her professors encouraged her writing but they were also unprepared for its political anger.

Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She was educated at the University of Texas and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has taught at Cornell University and now teaches at UCLA. She has written both poems and prose poems since publishing her first book, Tree Tall Woman, in 1981. Her prose poems, which grow out of the Language poetry movement, wittily display human motivation with a linguistic basis.