Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 29, 1924, John Haines studied at the National Art School, the American University, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, his works include For the Century's End: Poems 1990-1999 (University of Washington Press, 2001); At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993); and New Poems 1980-1988 (1990), for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award.

He also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989). Haines spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska and taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati. Haines's other honors included the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. John Haines died on March 2, 2011, in Fairbanks, Alaska. From https://poets.org