Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College, where she was literary editor of the leftist undergraduate journal Student Review. As a reporter for the journal, Rukeyser covered the 1932 Scottsboro trial in Alabama in which nine black youths were accused of raping two white girls. Following the Scottsboro trial, Rukeyser traveled extensively and moved amongst many different communities and social worlds for the remainder of her life. Among other things, she supported the Spanish Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War where she reported from Barcelona; she was once jailed in Washington for her protests of the Vietnam War; and, as president of the American Center for PEN, she traveled to South Korea in the 1970s to rally against the death sentence of poet Kim Chi-Ha, the incident which later became the framework of one of Rukeyser’s last poems, “The Gates.” After her death in 1980, Rukeyser’s work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser’s body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century.