One of the most influential women poets of 20^th century, Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York City on December 15, 1913, in an upper-middle class family of Midwestern and German-Jewish descent. She attended Vassar College and Columbia University in New York, working as an editor of the Student Review. She began to publish poetry while still at Vassar and her first collection of poetry, Theory of Flight (1935), received the Yale Younger Poets Award, while in 1942 she was awarded with the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In 1947, the same year she gave birth to her only child, William Rukeyser, she received the Levinson Prize for Poetry.

Rukeyser was an activist, particularly concerned with inequalities of sex, race and class: “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry” (Theory of Flight), became her life-long motto. She always identified herself with the labor. “In 1933 she travelled to Alabama to cover the Scottsboro Case—catching typhoid fever in a sheriff’s station there—where she was arrested working for the Internation Labor Defense, which handled the Scottsboro defendants’ appeals” (www.bookrags.com). She wrote for various journals and covered the antifascist Olympics in Barcelona in 1936, set up as an alternative to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out and her experience formed the basis for Mediterranean (1937). Similarly, The Book of the Dead (published in 1938, in her volume, U.S. 1) is based on personal experience, since it illustrates the research she conducted in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, investigating a rash of silicosis cases among miners there. Being heavily involved in political activism, she opposed the Vietnam War, travelling to Hanoi in 1972 as a peace ambassador, and she served as President of PEN’s American Centre to fight for the human rights of writers around the world. In 1978, she accepted an invitation to participate in a Lesbian Poetry Reading at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. Unfortunately, she suffered a stroke prior to this event and was unable to attend. She died two years later on 12 February 1980, in New York City.

Rukeyser’s political activism influenced her work, which functioned as a medium of social protest aimed at alerting her readers by cultivating social consciousness and unity. In Edward Hirsh’s view, “We haven't had many American poets with such a deep moral compass, such a keen historical sensibility and such a committed social consciousness. She wrote as a woman and identified strongly with the suffering of others.” (http://americanpoetsproject.com/about/reviews). In addition, “her poems constantly break silence around previously unwritten areas of female experience, for example, sex, menstruation, breast-feeding, mother-daughter relationships, and female aging” (www.glbtq.com), making her poetry of primary importance especially for feminists and lesbian readers.