Hass attended St. Mary’s College (B.A., 1963) in Moraga, California, and Stanford University (M.A., 1965; Ph.D., 1976). In the late 1960s he began teaching, working from 1971 to 1974 and 1975 to 1989 at St. Mary’s. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. Named poet laureate consultant in poetry in 1995, he used his two terms in the position to promote poetry and literacy, thus helping to redefine a position that until then had largely been ceremonial. Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life (1998) contains the weekly columns he wrote for the Washington Post during this period.
Hass’s first poetry collection, Field Guide, was published in 1973 after winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. It is filled with images of nature and the California landscape, common themes in his work, and is noted for the clarity and conciseness of its language. In Praise (1979), his second volume, Hass eloquently examines the use of language. His volume of essays on and reviews of American, European, and Japanese poets, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984; 3rd ed., 1997), won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. His translations, with others, of several works by Czesław Miłosz—including The Separate Notebooks (1984; with poet Robert Pinsky, Miłosz, and Renata Gorcyzski), Unattainable Earth (1986; with Miłosz), The Collected Poems, 1931–1987 (1988), and Provinces (1991; also with Miłosz)—and his introduction to and editing and verse translations of The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa (1994) and other volumes are evidence of the range of his interest in and engagement with poetic vision.
Among his own subsequent collections of poetry were Human Wishes (1989) and Sun Under Wood (1996), which won for Hass a second National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent much of the next decade teaching and working with human rights and environmental groups. He continued writing during this period, and his work, collected as Time and Materials: Poems, 1997–2005 (2007), received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems was published in 2010. Four years later Hass received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Summer Snow: New Poems appeared in 2020. His nonfiction included What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (2012). He also wrote A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2017).
Poetry is one of the world’s oldest and most adaptable art forms. A poem can be spoken, sung, read, or performed. It can take the form of a nursery rhyme, an epic, a ghazal, a tanka, a limerick, a film, or even a dance. English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” Certainly, the greatest poets—from Dante to Sappho, from Rabindranath Tagore to Gwendolyn Brooks, from Li Bai to Coleridge himself—kept to this seemingly simple but highly difficult rule. But great poets are hardly a thing of the past. The poets in this list are among the best English-language poets of the 21st century.
California-born Limón spent years working in marketing in New York City while writing poetry on her own time. She published three books of poetry before her stepmother’s death from colon cancer in 2010 prompted her to give up her marketing career and pursue writing full-time. Her collection Bright Dead Things (2015) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her next collection, The Carrying (2018), won the latter award. The Hurting Kind (2022) offers more experimental work than that of her previous collections. In 2022 Limón was named the 24th poet laureate of the United States.
Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village, on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, which overlays the borders of California, Arizona, and Nevada. A Native language activist working to revitalize the Mojave language and a former professional basketball player, Diaz has published poetry that draws upon her Native heritage and her sports career. Her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), tells the story of a sister grieving her brother’s descent into methamphetamine addiction. In 2021 Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), a collection of poems melding political perspectives on the colonization and destruction of Native land with intimate meditations on queer sexuality, romantic love, and the human body.
The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body. (from “The First Water Is the Body”)
Paul MuldoonNorthern Irish poet Paul Muldoon, 2017.
The son of a laborer and a schoolteacher, Muldoon grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland. In college he was tutored by fellow Northern Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. Muldoon’s poems appear spontaneous on the surface but reveal deeper significance upon closer inspection. He has worked in various poetic forms such as haiku, sestina, and sonnet. His numerous creative collaborations include an album with songwriter Warren Zevon. Muldoon has also translated the work of Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and edited a collection of Paul McCartney’s song lyrics. In 2003 Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for the collection Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).
The hedgehog gives nothing Away, keeping itself to itself. We wonder what a hedgehog Has to hide, why it so distrusts. (from “Hedgehog”)
An avid gardener and sports enthusiast, Gay became interested in poetry while attending his Pennsylvaniahigh school after reading Amiri Baraka’s “An Agony. As Now.” Gay’s poetry collections include Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of Gay’s best-known poems is “A Small Needful Fact,” a moving tribute to Eric Garner, a Black man whose death in 2014 at the hands of a New York police officer who had placed him in a lethal choke hold was one of the catalysts for the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay’s poetry is characterized by its musicality and its sense of compassion and joy. Indeed, Gay has written several essay collections on joy, beginning with the best-selling The Book of Delights (2019).
Thank you the quiet in which the river bends around the elephant’s solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating on its gentle back the flock of geese flying overhead. (from “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”)
Known for graphic, intensely personal poetry that often addresses family relationships and the pleasures and strength of the human body, the San Francisco-raised Olds made her debut in 1980 with the collection Satan Says. The book was heralded for its daring poems describing in frank language Olds’s early sexual life. In The Dead and the Living (1984), Olds honors dead family members and celebrates the living with a cycle of poems focusing on the traumas of her childhood. She has published many more collections of poetry that address marital and parental relationships. In 2013 Olds was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Stag’s Leap (2012), which chronicles the dissolution of her marriage.
When my daughter was in me, I felt I had a soul in me. But it was born with her. (from “The Borders”)
Brown grew up in Louisiana in a devout Evangelical family and later worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans while earning a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of New Orleans. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Brown’s upbringing informed his second collection of poetry, The New Testament (2014), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. In 2020 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Tradition (2019); the Pulitzer committee praised the collection for its “masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.” In 2024 Brown was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
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A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own. (from “Duplex”)
Warsan Shire
The daughter of Somali parents who fled their home country for Kenya, Shire was born in Nairobi and raised in London, where her family moved shortly after she was born. In 2014 she was named London’s first Young Poet Laureate. Many of Shire’s poems address the experiences of refugees, particularly political and sexual violence. In 2016 Shire collaborated with R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé on the music superstar’s acclaimed visual album Lemonade, which brought the poet worldwide renown. In 2022 Shire published her first full-length poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. (from “Home”)
Vuong and his family emigrated from Vietnam to the United States when he was two years old. He began writing poetry while he was in elementary school. In 2016 Vuong published his first full-length collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Featuring poems about war and violence, immigration, and queerness, the collection won many honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Forward Prize for best first collection. Vuong’s acclaimed first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), is written in fluid prose that reads like poetry. His second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (2022), was a New York Timesbest seller.
I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm. (from “Not Even This”)
Maggie NelsonAmerican poet and writer Maggie Nelson.
When she was 12 years old Nelson won a poetry contest sponsored by the Cure, her favorite band. The San Francisco-raised poet attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut and found early mentors in the writers Annie Dillard and Eileen Myles. Nelson has published essays and memoirs, including two books about the murder of her aunt in 1969 and the “autotheory” work The Argonauts (2015), which mixes feminist and queer theory with an account of Nelson’s marriage to the transgender artist Harry Dodge. Her most beloved work, however, is Bluets (2009). The genre-defying book explores love and heartbreak through 240 prose poems that meditate on the color blue.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as if it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. (from Bluets)
Armitage worked for six years as a probation officer in Greater Manchester in England before devoting himself full-time to poetry. A prolific writer, he has published numerous collections of poetry as well as plays, novels, and nonfiction works. He has also published acclaimed translations of medieval English classics, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the elegiac dream vision poem Pearl. Armitage’s own poetry draws on modern British life for its subject matter, and his most well-known poems are laced with a dark deadpan humor. In 2019 he was named poet laureate of Great Britain.
Songs about mills and mines and a great war, about mermaid brides and solid gold hills, songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films. (from “The Unaccompanied”)
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