Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island in 1934, and was raised and educated in the United States and South America. He is the author of many books of poems, including The Story of Our Lives, with The Monument and The Late Hour (2002, a reprint of three earlier collections); Blizzard of One: Poems (1998, winner of the Pulitzer Prize); Dark Harbor: A Poem (1993); Reasons for Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Notebook: Poems (1992, a reissue of three early books); The Continuous Life: Poems (1990); and Selected Poems (1980), all from Knopf. He has also published a collection of essays, The Weather of Words: Poetic Inventions (Knopf, 2001); several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Eavan Boland) (Norton, 2001); The Golden Ecco Anthology: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (Ecco, 1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976).

His honors include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.  

Photo by Emily Mott