Diane Wood Middlebrook

About the Author

Diane Wood Middlebrook was a distinguished American poet, biographer, and literary scholar whose work profoundly illuminated the lives and artistry of 20th-century women writers. Born in 1939 in Paterson, New Jersey, she earned her PhD from Yale University and taught for decades at Stanford University, where she founded the prestigious Creative Writing Program. Middlebrook's acclaimed biography Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991) offered an unflinching portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, drawing on extensive interviews and personal archives to explore Sexton's turbulent genius and struggles with mental illness. She also edited the Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, curating a collection that showcased the raw emotional power of Sexton's confessional verse. Throughout her career, Middlebrook blended rigorous scholarship with poetic insight, authoring several volumes of her own poetry and championing feminist perspectives in literature until her death in 2007.