Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1953. She is the author of five books of poetry, The Throne of Labdacus (2000), Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 (2000), A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), The Lamplit Answer (1985), and Portraits and Elegies (1982). She has received awards including the Rome Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She has been a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.