Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and political activist. She was born in New York City in 1913 and attended Vassar College. She published over fifteen volumes of poetry in her lifetime and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. She died in New York City in 1980.
Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction.
She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.