Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985 for her book, Yin.
Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. She wrote poetry as a child. When she was 17, The New Yorker printed one of her poems.
She got a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945. Then she studied Chinese at Columbia University. From 1946 to 1954, she married and had three children. In the mid-1950s, at the University of Washington, two of her teachers were poets Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. Roethke told her she should be a poet.
In 1964, she went to Pakistan for the US State Department. As a "Specialist in Literature," she taught at a number of schools there.
In addition to the Pulitzer, Kizer won the Frost Medal, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She was a chancellor (leader) of the Academy of American Poets.
She died in Sonoma, California in 2014.
Books
The Ungrateful Garden (1961) Knock Upon Silence (1965) Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971) Mermaids in the basement: poems for women (1984) Yin (1984) The Nearness of You (1986) Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1986) Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1993) Picking and Choosing: Prose on Prose (1995) Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996) Pro Femina: A Poem (2000) Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001)