Author’s statement:

May Swenson was born May 28, 1913, in Logan, Utah, and died December 4,1989, in Ocean View, Delaware. In that lifetime she worked as a newspaper reporter, secretary, ghost writer, editor, poet-in-residence, but always and mainly as a poet, publishing 450 poems of the 800 she wrote. All of these are love letters to the world, for she loved life and rejoiced in celebrating it. Her poems appeared in Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, Carleton Miscellany, The Nation, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and eleven published volumes. These earned for her much praise from fellow poets, a place in the hearts and minds of poetry lovers, and many awards, among them the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Ford fellowships, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an honorary doctor of letters degree from Utah State University, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.