Ellen Bryant Voigt grew up on her family’s farm in rural Virginia. She earned her BA from Converse College and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Bryant Voigt studied piano when she was a child, not turning to poetry until a friend in college introduced her to poems by E.E. Cummings and Rilke. She stated in a Vermont Public Radio interview that music influences her writing “entirely.” Bryant Voigt’s poems often traverse the worlds of motherhood, the rural South, family, and music. She served as poet laureate of Vermont for four years and has lived in there for many years.