Gerard Malanga · Public domain

Louise Glück wrote poetry out of her own life without quite writing memoir, using myth and the natural world as a lens on trauma, desire, and isolation rather than reporting them directly. She overcame anorexia as a teenager and never finished a degree at Sarah Lawrence or Columbia, teaching poetry instead at Yale and Stanford for much of her career. She served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize in Literature.