Poet Laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006, Ted Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, and received his MA in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He worked in the life insurance industry in Nebraska for roughly three decades, retiring in 1999 as a vice president, while writing poetry. His collection Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize, and he founded the syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry. He is an emeritus professor in the English department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
