The "Pearl Poet", or the "Gawain Poet", is the name given to the author of Pearl, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. Save for the latter (found in BL-MS Harley 2250), all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding Cotton Nero A.x. This body of work includes some of the greatest poetry written in Middle English.

The Pearl Poet remains unidentified. Some scholarship has argued to assign the poem to one John Massey, a member of the landed gentry from Cheshire. This attribution of the poems of Cotton Nero A.x is not widely accepted, however, reflected in the ongoing use of the labels "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain Poet."

The language of the poems shows that the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, who are sometimes (following the suggestion of academic John Burrow) collectively called the 'Ricardian Poets' in reference to the reign of Richard II of England. All four poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript are in the same Middle English dialect, localised to the area of north-western Staffordshire and south-eastern Cheshire, in the English midlands. This may merely indicate the dialect of the scribe responsible for copying the poems, but there is good evidence that the dialect of poet and scribe were very similar. It is, therefore, thought most likely that the poet was a native of east Cheshire or west Staffordshire and was writing in the latter part of the 14th century, and internal evidence indicates that all four works were probably written by the same author.

Ted Kooser (born 25 April 1939) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and the MA at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry. He is former vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life, an insurance company, and lives on land near the village of Garland, Nebraska. He owned a book publishing company, Windflower. He teaches as a Visiting Professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is married to Kathleen Rutledge, former editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

On August 12, 2004, he was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Librarian of Congress to serve a term from October 2004 through May 2005. In April 2005, Ted Kooser was appointed to serve a second term as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. During that same week Kooser received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book "Delights and Shadows" (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).

Emily Pauline Johnson (also known in Mohawk as Tekahionwake –pronounced: dageh-eeon-wageh, literally: 'double-life') (10 March 1861 – 7 March 1913), commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer popular in the late 19th century. Johnson was notable for her poems and performances that celebrated her First Nations heritage; her father was a Mohawk chief of mixed ancestry, and her mother an English immigrant. One such poem is the frequently anthologized "The Song My Paddle Sings".

Her poetry was published in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Johnson was one of a generation of widely read writers who began to define a Canadian literature. While her literary reputation declined after her death, since the later 20th century, there has been renewed interest in her life and works.

Pauline Johnson was born at Chiefswood, the family home built by her father in 1856 on the Six Nations Indian Reserve outside Brantford, Ontario. She was the youngest of four children of Emily Susanna Howells Johnson (1824–1898), a native of England, and George Henry Martin Johnson (1816–1884), a Mohawk chief whose mother was half European. Howells had immigrated to the United States in 1832 as a young child with her father, stepmother and siblings. Howells met Johnson while living with her older sister on the reserve, where her brother-in-law was an Anglican missionary.

Pearl Cleage (born December 7, 1948) is an African-American author whose work, both fiction and non-fiction, has been widely recognized. Her novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was a 1998 Oprah’s Book Club selection. Cleage is known for her feminist views, particularly regarding her identity as an African-American woman. Cleage currently teaches drama at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pearl Cleage was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of Doris Cleage née Graham), a teacher, and the late civil rights activist Bishop Albert Cleage. The family later moved to Detroit, Michigan after backlash from the community due to his radical teachings, where Bishop Cleage was a prominent Civil Rights leader. Cleage first attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1966 majoring in playwriting and dramatic literature. However she moved to Atlanta, Georgia to attend Spelman College in 1969, where she eventually attained a bachelor's degree in drama in 1971. She then joined the Spelman faculty as a writer and playwright in residence and as a creative director.