Carolyn Kizer

Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985 for her book, Yin.

Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. She wrote poetry as a child. When she was 17, The New Yorker printed one of her poems.[1]

She got a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945. Then she studied Chinese at Columbia University. From 1946 to 1954, she married and had three children.[1] In the mid-1950s, at the University of Washington, two of her teachers were poets Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.[2] Roethke told her she should be a poet.[1]

In 1964, she went to Pakistan for the US State Department. As a "Specialist in Literature," she taught at a number of schools there.[2][3]

In addition to the Pulitzer, Kizer won the Frost Medal, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She was a chancellor (leader) of the Academy of American Poets.[2]

She died in Sonoma, California in 2014.[1]