Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. David Pollock Young was an American poet, translator, editor, literary critic and professor. His work includes 11 volumes of poetry, translations from Italian, Chinese, German, Czech, Dutch, and Spanish, critical work on Shakespeare, Yeats, and modernist poets, and landmark anthologies of prose poetry and magical realism. He co-founded and edited the magazine FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics for its 50 years of publication. Young was Longman Professor Emeritus of English at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

David McElroy grew up on a farm in northern Wisconsin. He moved successively west and north by attending the universities of Minnesota, Montana, and Western Washington and taking various jobs. He has been a smokejumper, teacher in Guatemala, taxi driver, English teacher in Seattle's inner city, and currently is a pilot with over 30,000 hours flying light planes in bush Alaska from coastal southeast, Aleutians, interior, and the Arctic in support of the fishing and oil industries, forest fire control, wildlife censuses and bowhead whale surveys. He has been published in national journals and has a previous book of poems called Making It Simple. Winner of several grants and awards, he has given readings at various universities in the west and New York. His passions include hiking, snowshoeing, kayaking, and birding. With his wife photographer Edith Barrowclough and son Brandon, he travels widely in Alaska and the world. Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. For more information please see David McElroy.

American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection, The Wild Iris . Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award ( Triumph of Achilles ), the Academy of American Poet's Prize ( Firstborn ), as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.