DORIANNE LAUX, POET

“Laux is a believer in desire, and she takes her stance as a hero of the ordinary, with both feet firmly planted in the luminous material world. Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion. What we carry, she says, is the ashes of the dead under the station wagon seat, our losses and defeats, and the obligation to continue the human project.”
—Tony Hoagland, The Gettysburg Review

Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton,1997). Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, was published by W.W. Norton in fall of 2005.

Her work has been published in magazines such as Agni, The American Voice, Art/Life, Barrow Street, Best American Poetry, Best of the American Poetry Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, DoubleTake, Five Points, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms. Magazine, The New England Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Solo, The Southeast Review, The Southern Review, The Washington Post , ZYZZYVA and Diverse Publications: The International Journal of Erotica. She is listed in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry and her poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese. She was invited to read at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 2001 by Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz.

Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize for poetry, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux is an Associate Professor and works in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, and her daughter Tristem.

“I'm drawn to the tough, sensual voice of Dorianne Laux, for the way she loads her poems with physical details that add up to more than their sum...”
—Adrienne Rich, Ms. Magazine

“Gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life...”
—Philip Levine, Ploughshares