Dec 22 2025
On December 22, 1905, Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana. Over the next 76 years, he would become one of the most unusual and influential figures in twentieth-century American poetry: a largely self-educated poet, translator, critic, painter, political radical, environmental thinker, radio personality, jazz collaborator, and mentor whose San Francisco home became one …
Dec 21 2025
On December 21, 1926, Arnošt Lustig was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Years later, his birthday offers an opportunity to remember one of the most important Czech-Jewish writers of the twentieth century—a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, screenwriter, teacher, and Holocaust survivor who spent much of his literary life trying to find language for experiences that seemed …
Dec 20 2025
On January 10, 1917, Cahit Külebi was born in Çeltek, a village in the Zile district of Tokat in northern-central Anatolia. Over the course of the twentieth century, he would become one of modern Turkey’s most distinctive poets—a writer who blended the directness and musical qualities of Turkish folk poetry with the freedoms of modern …
Dec 19 2025
Born on December 19, 1952, Sean O’Brien has built one of the most wide-ranging careers in contemporary British poetry. A poet, critic, novelist, playwright, short-story writer, translator, anthologist, broadcaster, editor, and teacher, O’Brien has spent decades exploring the complicated territory where private memory meets public history. His poetry frequently returns to place: the streets and …
Dec 17 2025
Born on December 17, 1807, John Greenleaf Whittier became one of the best-known American poets of the nineteenth century, but poetry was only one part of his remarkable life. He was also a journalist, editor, reformer, political organizer, and committed abolitionist who spent decades using his writing to argue against slavery. Later generations would remember …
Dec 16 2025
Born on December 16, 1902, in El Puerto de Santa María on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz, Rafael Alberti became one of the defining poets of twentieth-century Spanish literature. A member of the remarkable Generation of ’27, Alberti was also a painter, playwright, memoirist, political activist, and lifelong experimenter whose creative career stretched across most of …
Dec 13 2025
Born on December 13, 1911, Kenneth Patchen spent his career refusing to accept boundaries between poetry, painting, music, fiction, and performance. He wrote fiercely against war and cruelty, celebrated love with equal intensity, experimented with typography decades before visual poetry became widely fashionable, painted directly onto books, and helped pioneer the fusion of spoken poetry …
Dec 11 2025
Born on December 11, 1922, Grace Paley became one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American short fiction. Her published body of stories was relatively small, but the world contained inside it was enormous: New York streets, crowded apartments, playgrounds, marriages, divorces, children, aging parents, political arguments, neighborhood gossip, immigrant memories, and women trying …
Dec 09 2025
Born on December 9, 1608, John Milton became one of the towering figures of English literature, a poet whose work combined enormous intellectual ambition with political conviction, religious questioning, classical learning, and an extraordinary command of language. His epic Paradise Lost transformed the biblical story of humanity’s fall into one of the most influential poems …
Dec 08 2025
Born on December 8, 1961, in Santana on the island of São Tomé, Conceição Lima became one of the most important literary voices of São Tomé and Príncipe. A poet, journalist, broadcaster, chronicler, and cultural advocate, she spent much of her writing life examining what it means to inherit a place shaped by slavery, plantation …
