Poet Laureate Ted Kooser in Syracuse
"Community Life in Poetry"
a year of poetry, a day of celebration, a constant community voice

About Ted Kooser The author of ten collections of poetry, Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Iowa State University in 1962 and his master’s degree at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is a visiting professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Among Kooser’s awards and honors are two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.

In April 2005, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington appointed Ted Kooser to serve a second term as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, during the same week that Kooser received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book, Delights and Shadows (2004).

Upon Kooser's first appointment as Poet Laureate in 2004, Billington said, "Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways."

During his first term as Poet Laureate, Kooser, with the support of the Poetry Foundation, inaugurated the program "American Life in Poetry" (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org), which offers a free weekly column to local newspapers around the country. It features a brief poem by a living American and a sentence or two of introduction by Kooser. This initiative offers the chance for poets to reach tens of thousands of readers.

Kooser’s other collections of poetry include Sure Signs (1980), which received the Society of Midland Authors Prize for the best book of poetry by a midwestern writer published in that year; One World at a Time (1985); Weather Central (1994); and Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison (2000), winner of the 2001 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A book of his essays, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002), won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. The book was also chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers, and it won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazines Book of the Year Awards.

With his longtime friend Jim Harrison, Kooser co-authored Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (2003), for which the two poets received the 2003 Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors.

He lives near the village of Garland, NE, with his wife Kathleen Rutledge, the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

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