Dorianne Laux was born in 1952 in Augusta, Maine, and raised in Southern California. Between the ages of 18 and 30 she worked as a gas station manager, sanatorium cook, maid, and donut holer. A single mother, she took occasional classes and poetry workshops at the local junior college, writing poems during shift breaks. In 1983 she moved to Berkeley, California, where she began writing in earnest. Supported by scholarships and grants, she returned to school when her daughter Tristem was 9, and was graduated with honors from Mills College in the Spring of 1988 with a B.A. Degree in English. Her first book, Awake, with an introduction by Philip Levine, was published in 1990 and nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In the same year she was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She now lives in Petaluma, California, where she teaches private poetry workshops. In the Fall of 1994 she will move to Eugene, Oregon, to join the faculty at the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. What We Carry is her second book of poems.
