Anne Sexton

(1928 - 1974)

Born in Newton, Massachusetts, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Anne Sexton wrote her first poem in her late twenties, shortly after giving birth to her two children: “I was watching television, a program on the form of the sonnet, and I said, I can do that. So I wrote a poem. It wasn’t very good and I didn’t offer it for publication.” Sexton published nine collections of poetry, often writing about living with depression, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She died by suicide at the age of forty-five.