Linda Pastan was born on May 27, 1932, in the Bronx, NY, the only child of Jewish-American parents. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she gave up poetry in order to concentrate on domestic life. After 10 years of raising a family, her husband urged her to return to poetry. Since the early 1970s, Pastan has prolifically produced quiet lyrics on the domestic world she knows so well. Her dozen or so books of poetry and a number of essays so far have established her as a writer of short poems that address in a witty, down-to-earth manner topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships. In “Becoming a Writer: An Interview” (2001) she describes her style as follows: “I have a natural impulse to condense. I'd like to write long narrative poems. I'd like to write a novel. And any time I start anything long, I keep trying to take out anything extraneous, anything that doesn't belong, and I end up with a small lyric poem that just happens” (http://www.nortonpoets.com/sample/pastanlinterview.htm).

Linda Pastan has received numerous awards, including the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America), the Bess Hokin Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also received the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award. Two of her collections of poems were nominated for the National Book Award and one for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

According to PoetryFoundation.org, she served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995 and was on the staff of the Breadloaf Writers Conference for twenty years (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5253).