Linda Gregerson

Linda Gregerson was born on August 5, 1950 in Elgin, Illinois. She received a BA from Oberlin College in 1971, an MA from Northwestern University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and her PhD from Stanford University.

Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Prodigal: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Among her earlier books, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996) was a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Gregerson is also the author of literary criticism, including Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

About her work, the poet Rosanna Warren writes, “Tender and harrowing, jagged, severely precise and floodlit with compassion, Linda Gregerson’s poems break and mend poetic language as they break and mend the heart.”

Gregerson has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2015 to 2021. Gregerson teaches at the University of Michigan as distinguished professor of English and creative writing.