Ted Kooser is currently serving a second term as the nation’s Poet Laureate. His appointment came in the same week that he received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book, Delight and Shadows, full of literary portraits and landscapes of life on the Great Plains. During his first term as Poet Laureate, Kooser inaugurated the program “American Life in Poetry” which offers a free weekly column to local newspapers around the country featuring a brief poem by a living American and a sentence of two of introduction to the work.
The author of ten collections of poetry, Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939. In 2000, Kooser published Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison. His second collaboration with his friend is Braided Creek. He is a visiting professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.