Author City: EAST LANSING, MI USA
Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at University of California, Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. She has earned her living as a bookstore clerk, a junior high school teacher in Manhattan, a library storyteller, a Visiting Writer and, for ten years on-the-road, by giving poetry readings on college campuses. Since 1975, she has been Poet in Residence at Michigan State University, where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor. Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes of poetry since her first book, Coins & Coffins, was published by Hawk's Well Press in 1962. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989.