Biography         Carolyn Ashley Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington in 1925. Her father      was a lawyer and her mother was a biologist and professor. She was educated      at Sarah Lawrence College and graduated in 1945. After that she went to      Columbia University as a Fellow of the Chinese Government in Comparative      Literature and also lived in China for a year. She continued her studies at the      University of Washington.      In 1959 Carolyn Kizer founded the poetry journal Poetry Northwest and she was the editor until 1965. In 1964-65 she lived in Pakistan, where she was a U.S. State Department Specialist in Literature, taught at a women's college and translated poems from Urdu into English. In 1966 she became the first Director of the Literature Program for National Endowment for the Arts and even though she resigned in 1970, she continued as a consultant for another year.                                                     Carolyn Kizer has been a poet-in-residence and lecturer at several major universities in America; Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, North Carolina and Ohio for example. She has also been a visiting writer at literary conferences and events in America, as well as in Ireland and France. In 1995 she became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, but she resigned in 1998 to protest against the absence of women and colored people on the board. She has always been engaged in feminist and human rights activities.     Carolyn Kizer has been rewarded with many prizes and awards for her writing. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Yin in 1985, followed by The award of Honor of the San Francisco Arts Commission, The Borrestone Award, the Pushcart Prize and Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, just to mention a few. She is married to John Marshall Woodbridge, has three children and lives in Sonoma, California and Paris, France. Ulrika Josefsson