Louise Glück grew up on Long Island and attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Her poems are elegantly poised and spare, even though their recurrent themes—loss, disenfranchisement, divorce, death—are often dark. She returns again and again to myths and ancient tales, often revivifying them to explore modern topics. Many of her poems are attuned to cycles of nature, through which desire and hope are renewed. She has won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal. In 2020 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." She teaches at Yale and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.