Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California, and, according to her own account, began writing poems when she was seven years old. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. In 1965 she married S. Shepard Sherbell and, after divorcing Sherbell, married Michael Watterland in 1973. Wakoski has been awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Robert Frost fellowship (1966), the Cassandra Foundation Award (1970), a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (1971), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1973). She has held poet-in-residence positions at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, Colorado College, Willamette University, Hollins College, the University of California at Irvine, Macalester College, Lake Forest College, Michigan State University, the University of Hawaii, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, the University of Wisconsin, and Emory University. Wakoski is currently a professor of English at Michigan...