Armantrout, Rae, 1947-

American writer and poet, Armantrout teaches classes on poetry and personal narrative at the University of California, San Diego.

From the description of Rae Armantrout papers, circa 1970-2001. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 462519833

Rae Armantrout was born on April 12, 1947, in Vallejo, California, and grew up in San Diego. She studied literature at UC Berkeley, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1970, and at San Francisco State University where she earned her master's degree in creative writing. Armantrout is one of the founding members of the West Coast "Language Poetry" movements and worked with other Language poets including Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian. Armantrout's first publication was in 1978, entitled Extremities, followed by nine other books of poetry. Armantrout has been a finalist for the PEN USA Award in 2001 and 2004, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, as well as the 2008 winner of the Frederick Bock Poetry Prize. For the past twenty years, Armantrout has taught in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

From the description of Rae Armantrout papers, 1947-2010. (University of California, San Diego). WorldCat record id: 291090306

Biography

The poet and essayist Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California on 13 April 1947 and grew up in San Diego. Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, she later received a Master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1975. Armantrout is the author of many books, including, among others, Extremities (1978), The Invention of Hunger (1979), Precedence (1985) Necroromance (1991), Made to Seem (1995), Writing the Plot about Sets (1998), True (a memoir, 1998), The Pretext (2001), Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), Up to Speed (2004), and Next Life (2007). A founding member of the West Coast "Language Poetry" movement, Armantrout worked closely with a dynamic group of writers including Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Steve Benson, Barret Watten, Tom Mandel, and Carla Harryman. Although Language poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of nonreferentiality, Armantrout's work, focusing as it often does on the local and the domestic, resists such definitions. Internationally known, Armantrout's work has been the subject of numerous essays (some of which are gathered in A Wild Salience: The Writings of Rae Armantrout, a collection dedicated to her work), and an entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 193). Currently, she teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

From the guide to the Rae Armantrout papers, circa 1970-2001, (Department of Special Collections and University Archives)

Biography

Rae Armantrout was born on April 12, 1947, in Vallejo, California, and grew up in San Diego. Armantrout studied literature at UC Berkeley, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1970. She later received her master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1975. Armantrout is one of the founding members of the West Coast "Language Poetry" movements and worked with other Language poets including Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Lyn Hejinian. Armantrout and her husband Chuck Korkegien returned to San Diego in the early 1980s.

Armantrout's first publication was in 1978, entitled Extremities, followed by nine other books of poetry, including Made to Seem (1995), Veil (2001), Up to Speed (2004), Next Life (2007), and Versed (2009). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Language Poetries, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, and 2008.

Armantrout has been a finalist for the PEN USA Award in 2001 and 2004, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, as well as the 2008 winner of the Frederick Bock Poetry Prize. She is one of ten poets currently working on the project The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography, which is a collaboration by ten writers identified with the rise of Language Poetry in San Francisco. Writing on the volumes began in 1998, with the first volume (of a proposed ten) being published in November 2006. For the past twenty years, Armantrout has taught in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

From the guide to the Rae Armantrout Papers, 1954-2009, (Mandeville Special Collections Library)