Born in Sacramento, California, William Everson was the son of a Norwegian composer. He attended Fresno State College until leaving in 1935 to write poetry. Robinson Jeffers was one of his strongest literary influences at the time. He was a conscientious objector during World War II, working as a forester in Oregon for three years, and soon afterwards joined the San Francisco anarcho-pacifist group centered around poet Kenneth Rexroth. In 1949, Everson converted to Roman Catholicism, wrote “The Making of the Cross,” and the following year he joined the Catholic Worker Movement.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, but emigrated to the United States in January 1939. He is thus claimed on both sides of the ocean. That year Auden also fell in love with the American writer Chester Kallman, who became his lifetime partner. Auden took American citizenship in 1946, but thereafter he divided his time between New York and southern Italy.

Owen’s iconic war poems, composed in the year before he was killed in France, are in many ways the most influential to have come out of World War I.

Arguably the greatest poet of his generation, Yeats produced World War I poetry pervaded by a sense of impending violence. 

While Crane is best known for his novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and for his short stories, he also wrote two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899).

Through the course of a long and productive career, William Heyen has regularly returned to the Holocaust as a subject. Thus we open this selection from his work with his frequently anthologized poem “Riddle.” But in many ways his most remarkable achievement is the book-length poem sequence Crazy Horse in Stillness (1996), which consists of a 464-poem “dialogue” between the great Ogalala Lakota war chief Crazy Horse (c.

Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in San Francisco of Chicana and Native American (Chumash) heritage. For many years she taught at University of Colorado and edited the Chicana/o journal MANGO, which was the first to publish Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Alberto Ríos, all poets included in the present collection. Her work has long evoked the dynamics of race, sex, class, and economics in Latino culture, with a special emphasis on the impact of the dominant culture on the lives of Latina women and on the forms of resistance they have devised. 

Kathleen Fraser grew up in Oklahoma, Colorado, and California, graduating from Occidental College, then working in New York as an editorial assistant for Mademoiselle for a time before taking up her writing and teaching career full time. While teaching at San Francisco State University from 1972 to 1992, she directed The Poetry Center and founded The American Poetry Archives. Fraser was co-founder and co-editor, of the feminist poetics newsletter (HOW)ever.

Timothy Steele was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Stanford and Brandeis. Partly because of his early commitment to meter and rhyme when free verse dominated the contemporary scene—and partly because he has theorized the formal choices available to poets in his critical book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (1990)—Steele has become a leading figure in the loosely defined New Formalist movement. Steele also wrote a textbook, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (1999).