May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah. She earned a B.S. at Utah State University in 1939 and worked as an editor at New Directions Press between 1959 and 1966. She was a poet-in-residence at Purdue University in 1966-1967 and has been instructor in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Lethbridge University in Alberta, Canada, and the University of California at Riverside. In 1976, she was a member of the staff at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants for her work in poetry, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1959), National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1960), a Ford Foundation fellowship for drama (1965), a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1967), two National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1974, 1976), and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1979). She has spent most of her life in or near New York City, currently lives at Sea Cliff, New York, and has traveled...