Carl Dennis was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1939. He attended Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before settling at the University of Minnesota to earn his bachelor’s degree. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His works of poetry include House of My Own (1974), The Outskirts of Troy (1988), Ranking the Wishes (1997), and Practical Gods (2001), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Most recently, he released his New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004 in 2004. In addition to the Pulitzer, Dennis has been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and has received the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as a fellowship at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Dennis has taught at the University of New York at Buffalo since 1966, where, in 2002, he became an artist-in-residence.