Louise Elisabeth Glück (born 22 April 1943) is an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000.^[1]

Biography[link]

Early Life[link]

Glück was born in New York City of Hungarian Jewish heritage. She grew up on Long Island. Her father, an immigrant from Hungary, helped invent and market the X-Acto Knife.^[2] Glück graduated in 1961 from George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York. She went on to attend Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University; however, she did not graduate from either of them.^[3]

Career[link]

Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award (Triumph of Achilles), the Academy of American Poet's Prize (Firstborn), as well as numerous Guggenheim fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was previously a Senior Lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Glück currently teaches at Yale University, where she is the Rosencranz Writer in Residence, and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University. She has also been a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont.^[4]

Glück is the author of twelve books of poetry, including: "A Village Life" (2009); Averno (2006) which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; Ararat (1990), which received the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. The First Four Books collects her early poetry.

Louise Glück has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Sarabande Books published in chapbook form a new, six-part poem, October, in 2004. In 2001 Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1999 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2003 she was named as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and served in that position through 2010. Glück was appointed the US Poet Laureate from 2003–2004, succeeding Billy Collins.

Bibliography[link]

Poetry

• Firstborn (1968)
• The House on Marshland (1975)
• The Garden (1976)
• Descending Figure (1980)
• The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
• Ararat (1990)
• The Wild Iris (1992)
• Mock Orange (1993)
• The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
• Meadowlands (1997)
• "Telemachus' Guilt"
• Vita Nova (1999)
• The Seven Ages (2001)
• Averno (2006)
• A Village Life (2009) (shortlisted for the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize)

Prose

• Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)

References[link]

1. ^ "Former Poet Laureate Louise Glück". Library of Congress. 2009. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/more_gluck.html. Retrieved 2009-01-01. 
2. ^ PostClassic
3. ^ “Louise Glück (b. 1943)”. Columbia Granger's World of Poetry Online. http://www.columbiagrangers.org (accessed April 12, 2012).
4. ^ http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/art-news/2010/04/13/gluck-fuses-poetry-teaching-style/

External links[link]

• Full text of Averno available at The Floating Library
• Louise Glück: Online Resources from the Library of Congress
• Yale University English Department Profile of Glück
• Boston University Creative Writing Department Profile of Glück
• Louise Glück at poets.org
• Louise Glück: Online Resources from Modern American Poetry, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Louise Glück In Conversation
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip