Jul 23 2026
Born on July 23, 1946, René Ricard moved through some of the most influential artistic circles in twentieth-century New York while resisting almost every attempt to place him neatly inside one profession. He was a poet, actor, painter, art critic, downtown personality, and sometime Warhol performer whose eye for emerging talent helped draw attention to …
Jul 20 2026
Born on July 20, 1864, Erik Axel Karlfeldt became one of the defining Swedish poets of his generation by returning again and again to the landscapes, seasons, traditions, humor, music, and rural life of Dalarna, the province where he grew up. His poems are deeply local, filled with farms, forests, flowers, harvests, old customs, changing …
Jul 19 2026
Born on July 19, 1875, Alice Dunbar-Nelson lived at the intersection of literature and activism during one of the most consequential periods in American history. She was a poet, fiction writer, essayist, journalist, teacher, editor, public speaker, suffragist, anti-lynching activist, political organizer, and advocate for Black education whose career extended from the final decades of …
Jul 15 2026
Born on July 15, 1913, Abraham Sutzkever became one of the most important Yiddish poets of the twentieth century and one of the extraordinary literary witnesses to the destruction of Jewish Vilna during the Holocaust. His life carried him from a childhood in Siberia to the flourishing Yiddish culture of interwar Vilna, through the Vilna …
Jul 13 2026
Born on July 13, 1934, Wole Soyinka has spent more than seven decades moving between worlds: theatre and poetry, Yoruba tradition and European literary forms, comedy and tragedy, private memory and public history. A playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, actor, director, teacher, and public intellectual, he created a body of work that is unmistakably rooted …
Jul 12 2026
Born on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda became one of the most widely read poets of the twentieth century, creating a body of work that could move from intimate love poems to surreal visions, celebrations of ordinary objects, political verse, sweeping histories of Latin America, and poems rooted in the landscapes of his native Chile. …
Jul 09 2026
Born on July 9, 1834, Jan Neruda became one of the defining voices of nineteenth-century Czech literature by writing about the city directly outside his door. A poet, short-story writer, critic, essayist, and extraordinarily prolific journalist, he found his greatest material not in distant historical epics but in Prague’s streets, shops, courtyards, taverns, apartments, workers, …
Jul 08 2026
Richard Aldington began his literary career as one of the young poets trying to strip poetry down to something sharper, clearer, and more immediate. As a founding figure in Imagism alongside H.D., Ezra Pound, F. S. Flint, and others, he helped create a modernist poetry built around precise images, concentrated language, free verse, and a …
Jul 07 2026
Margaret Walker spent a lifetime joining poetry with history. She wrote about Black American life not as something peripheral to the national story but as one of the places where the meaning of America could be understood most clearly. Her poetry carried the rhythms of sermons, blues, spirituals, folk speech, work songs, family stories, and …
Jul 06 2026
Harold Norse spent much of his life standing close to literary movements without allowing any one of them to contain him completely. He knew W. H. Auden before the Beat Generation existed, found an important mentor in William Carlos Williams, met a young Allen Ginsberg years before Howl, traveled through Europe and North Africa as …
