Rae Armantrout is a California poet associated with the Language Poets. She was born in Vallejo, California in 1947, grew up in San Diego and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and received a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1975. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. She has published numerous books of poetry and prose and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies including In The American Tree (National Poetry Foundation), Language Poetries (New Directions), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, From the Other Side of the Century (Sun & Moon), Out of Everywhere (Reality & Street), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, and 2004 (Scribners). Armantrout is often described as the most lyrical of the language poets.
Armantrout has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1989. She is currently one of ten poets working on a project entitled The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography. Writing on the volume began in 1998 and the first volume (of a proposed ten) was published in November 2006, and thereafter in three-month intervals. Rae Armantrout's papers are held by Stanford University Archives.
