Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985 for her book, Yin.

Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. She wrote poetry as a child. When she was 17, The New Yorker printed one of her poems.^[1]

She got a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945. Then she studied Chinese at Columbia University. From 1946 to 1954, she married and had three children.^[1] In the mid-1950s, at the University of Washington, two of her teachers were poets Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz.^[2] Roethke told her she should be a poet.^[1]

In 1964, she went to Pakistan for the US State Department. As a "Specialist in Literature," she taught at a number of schools there.^[2][3]

In addition to the Pulitzer, Kizer won the Frost Medal, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She was a chancellor (leader) of the Academy of American Poets.^[2]

She died in Sonoma, California in 2014.^[1]

• The Ungrateful Garden (1961)
• Knock Upon Silence (1965)
• Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971)
• Mermaids in the basement: poems for women (1984)
• Yin (1984)
• The Nearness of You (1986)
• Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1986)
• Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1993)
• Picking and Choosing: Prose on Prose (1995)
• Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996)
• Pro Femina: A Poem (2000)
• Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001)

• List of poets from North America

This short article about a person from the United States can be made longer. You can help Wikipedia by adding to it.