Although Carolyn Kizer has not been a prolific poet, her meticulously crafted work has received high critical praise. She has also made important contributions to the arts as translator, teacher, editor, and critic. In 1985 Kizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Yin: New Poems (1984), and in 1988 she won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Award. Proses: On Poems & Poets was published in 1993 as the inaugural issue in Writing Re: Writing, a series whose editors intend "each annual volume to be a major collection of essays on poetry by a leading poet."

In "The Stories of My Life" (the first section of Proses), as well as in prose pieces in Yin and The Nearness of You (1986), Kizer writes of her extraordinary childhood and traces the forces that destined her to be a woman of letters. Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington, the only child of Benjamin Hamilton and Mabel Ashley...