Ai (1947–2010) was born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Of Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche ancestry, she legally changed her name to Ai, the Japanese word for love, and earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Vice: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 1999) won the National Book Award for Poetry, and Killing Floor (Houghton, 1979) won the 1978 Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets.
