Bishop, Elizabeth

1911-79

Canadian-American poet and professor

Bishop's father died when she was a baby. When she was five her mother was permanently hospitalized for mental illness and she never saw her again. She was then raised by her grandparents in Canada but also went to boarding schools.

As an adult she lived in Brazil for 16 years before returning to the USA in 1970 to teach at the University of Washington, Harvard, New York University and MIT. Her poetry earned her the Brazilian Order of Rio Branco, the US National Book Award, the US National Book Critics Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her books include Questions of Travel, Poems: North and South, A Cold Spring, The Diary of "Helena Morley" and Geography III.

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References

Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia, 1993-97
Millier. Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
"Elizabeth Bishop, American Poet, 1911-1979." [Includes portrait]. Available at: http://iberia.vassar.edu/bishop/