I write about poetry, poets, culture, and creativity. I also teach poetry as Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. My most recent project has been The New Anthology of American Poetry, co-edited with Camille Roman and Thomas Travisano. This three-volume teaching anthology provides copious commentary on each poet and poem, amounting to a literary history as well as a collection of poems. Volume 1 (2003) moves from the pre-Columbian beginnings to 1900, including such poets as Anne Bradstreet, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as poems by Native Americans, African American poets, and Latina/o and Asian immigrants. Volume 2 (2005) looks at the modernist period, focusing on such poets as Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Marianne Moore, Angelina Weld Grimke, Charles Reznikoff, and Langston Hughes as well as many lesser-known poets, popular song lyrics and immigrant poems. Volume 3 (2012) carries the story up to the present postmodern moment, including poets ranging from Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Gwendolyn Brooks through Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath to Bob Dylan, Marilyn Chin, Rae Armantrout, and Lorna Dee Cervantes.My first book, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978), charts Lowell's life and career as a poet who continuously remade himself. I returned to Lowell in such edited books as Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1986) and The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (1999).Another of my books, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), is a biography of Plath's imagination. It traces the poet's conflicts with her parents and poetic precursors; her ambivalencer toward her husband, Ted Hughes; her awareness of gender politics; her divided sense of self; and her creative drive.My most recent articles have appeared in books edited by Jo Gill and by Salley Bayley and Tracy Brain and in the on-line Plath Profiles.I've spent my life in poetry, moved, challenged, and mystified by the forms words can take.