- Person
- Louise Glück
- Lived
- 1943–2023
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- American
The story
Louise Glück was born in New York in 1943 to a Jewish family; her paternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews who emigrated in 1900, and her mother was of Russian Jewish descent. Anorexia forced her out of high school and kept her from full-time college, and she credited seven years of psychoanalysis with saving her life. She learned her craft in workshops at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, with the poets Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, whom she always named as her mentors. She never took a degree.
That experience of being taught, one to one, shaped a lifetime of teaching others. After her first book she was stuck in writer’s block until 1971, when she began teaching poetry at Goddard College in Vermont; teaching, she said, unlocked her writing. She went on to teach at Williams College from 1984, at Yale from 2004, where she became the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry, and at Stanford from 2023, and she taught as a visitor at Boston University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
From 2003 to 2010 she judged the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary competition in the United States, which publishes a first book each year. Her choices included collections by Peter Streckfus, Jay Hopler and Fady Joudah. She also served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 2003–2004, as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and as a special consultant helping the Library of Congress plan its bicentennial.
Her own books, from The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, to Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the National Book Award in 2014, are widely anthologised and taught. In 2020 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. She died in 2023.
Why it matters
Glück’s poems are taught in classrooms worldwide, and the students she taught and the young poets whose first books she chose carry her exacting standards into American poetry today.
About Louise Glück
New York-born poet and US Poet Laureate whose spare, piercing poems of grief, family and myth are read and taught worldwide, and who taught and championed young poets for fifty years. Nobel 2020.
Sources
- Louise Glück Wikipedia
- Louise Glück, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Biobibliography: Louise Glück NobelPrize.org
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