Finalists - double book by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout (born in Vallejo, California) is a central figure in the Language Poetry movement and one of the most influential experimental American poets of her generation. She studied at the University of California, San Diego, where she later taught for decades. Her collection Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work is characterized by compressed, interrogative lyric that resists easy interpretation, often probing the processes of perception and social conditioning. She has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Holloway Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.