Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske-Dukes (born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor. In 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of California.

Life
She received B.A. English from Creighton University in 1967, and her M.A. in 1970 from the San Francisco State University. She has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Virginia. She is the founder of the doctoral Program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, where she currently teaches.

She has a daughter, Annie Muske-Dukes, who graduated from USC in May 2005, and she is the widow of actor David Dukes, who died in 2000. Her 2003 collection of poetry, Sparrow, chronicling the love and loss of David Dukes, was a National Book Award finalist.

In addition to her seven books of poetry, she has published four novels, the most recent of which, Channeling Mark Twain (2007), is about a woman poet who teaches poetry at a women's detention facility, just as the author herself did and the perspectives she gains from the poetry her students write. Her work has appeared in Antaeus, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and The New Yorker,.

Recognition

 * 1999 Witter Bynner Fellowship
 * 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship
 * 1979 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America
 * National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry
 * Ingram-Merrill grant.

Essay Collections

 * Women & Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self (University of Michigan Press, 1997)
 * Women & Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self (University of Michigan Press, 1997)

Collaborative Works

 * ''Rendezvous with light: A Collection of Poetry and Photographs: Carol Muske-Dukes and Robbie Kreinces (Figueroa Press, 2005)