Of the poets of his generation, those William Heyen has called the "poets of the year 2000," William Pitt Root has best represented the wandering bard. The son of a farmer, William, and Bonita Hilbert Root, he was born on 28 December 1941 in Austin, Minnesota, and raised in Florida near the Everglades. He has studied at the University of Washington (B.A., 1964), the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (M.F.A., 1967), and Stanford University (Stegner Fellow, 1968-1969) and has taught and written in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, Vermont, Idaho, Oregon, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Washington, Kansas, and New York, as well as London, Cornwall, Scotland, and the northern Mediterranean. At present he is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Hunter College in New York. His wife is the poet Pamela Uschuk, and he has a daughter, Jennifer, from his previous marriage to Judith Bechtold, which ended...