May Swenson

May Swenson was born Anna Thilda May Swenson on May 28, 1913, in Logan, Utah. Her parents were Swedish immigrants, and her father was a professor of mechanical engineering at Utah State University. English was her second language, her family having spoken mostly Swedish in their home. Influenced early on by Edgar Allan Poe, she kept journals as a young girl, in which she wrote in multiple genres. Swenson attended Utah State University and received a bachelor’s degree in 1934. Since her first collection of poems, Another Animal, was published by Scribner in 1954, Swenson’s work has been admired for its adventurous word play and erotic exuberance. Swenson’s other poetry collections include The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003); May Out West (Utah State University Press, 1996); Nature: Poems Old and New (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994); In Other Words (Knopf, 1987); New & Selected Things Taking Place (Little, Brown, 1978); Iconographs (Scribner, 1970); Half Sun, Half Sleep (Scribner, 1967); To Mix With Time: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 1963); and A Cage of Spines (Rinehart, 1958). She is also the author of three collections of poems for younger readers, including The Guess & Spell Coloring Book (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976); More Poems to Solve (Scribner, 1971); and Poems to Solve (Scribner, 1966). As a translator, she published Windows and Stones: Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), which received a medal of excellence from the International Poetry Forum. She also wrote a one-act play titled The Floor, which was produced in New York in the 1960s. Swenson died in Oceanview, Delaware, on December 4, 1989. She is buried in the city where she was born. (Source)