May 21 2026
Born on May 21, 1923, Dorothy Hewett became one of the most unconventional and influential voices in twentieth-century Australian literature. Across poetry, novels, plays, journalism, autobiography, and musical theater, she wrote about women seeking freedom, working-class communities, political commitment and disillusionment, sexuality, family, landscape, memory, and the uneasy distance between the lives people are expected …
May 18 2026
Born around May 18, 1048, Omar Khayyam became one of history’s most remarkable combinations of poet, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. In the English-speaking world, his name is inseparable from the Rubaiyat, the famous collection of quatrains associated with wine, gardens, love, mortality, fate, and the fleeting nature of human life. In his own time, however, …
May 16 2026
Born on May 16, 1929, Adrienne Rich became one of the most influential American poets and essayists of the twentieth century, transforming not only her own writing but also the possibilities available to generations of women who followed her. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, Rich wrote about marriage, motherhood, sexuality, feminism, war, …
May 12 2026
Born in Moscow on May 12, 1933, Andrei Voznesensky emerged during one of the most remarkable moments in twentieth-century Russian literature. He was a poet trained as an architect, a dazzling public performer, an experimenter with sound and visual form, and one of the young writers who captured the sense of possibility surrounding the cultural …
May 09 2026
Born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo has spent more than five decades creating poetry in which memory, music, land, history, family, grief, survival, and the spiritual world continually speak to one another. A member of the Muscogee Nation, Harjo has become one of the most influential voices in contemporary American literature, …
May 08 2026
Born on May 8, 1930, Gary Snyder has spent a lifetime exploring the connections between poetry, wilderness, work, Buddhism, community, and the responsibilities human beings have toward the places they inhabit. Although he emerged from the literary world surrounding the Beat Generation in the 1950s, Snyder’s career quickly expanded far beyond that movement. His poetry …
May 07 2026
Born on May 7, 1892, Archibald MacLeish belonged to a generation of American writers forced to reconsider almost everything they had inherited. World War I shattered old assumptions about civilization, modernism transformed literature and art, economic depression challenged confidence in American institutions, and another world war eventually demanded decisions about the responsibilities of writers in …
May 06 2026
Born on May 6, 1904, Harry Martinson traveled farther than most writers ever do, both literally and imaginatively. He spent part of his youth aboard merchant ships, wandered through foreign ports, wrote about forests and insects with extraordinary tenderness, transformed the hardships of his childhood into fiction, and eventually carried Swedish poetry into interstellar space …
May 05 2026
Born on May 5, 1865, in Bangor, Maine, Helen Maud Merrill belonged to a generation of American women whose literary careers were built largely in newspapers, magazines, local literary societies, commemorative publications, and other forms of print culture that have not always survived neatly into the modern literary canon. She wrote poetry and prose, published …
May 04 2026
Born on May 4, 1006, in Herat, Khwaja Abdullah Ansari became one of the great spiritual voices of the medieval Persian-speaking world. Scholar, teacher, Qur’anic commentator, theologian, mystic, and master of devotional prose, he spent most of his life in and around Herat, the ancient city with which his memory became so closely associated that …
