John Ashbery

A Worldly Country: new poems by John Ashbery (2007).  The son of a farmer and a biology teacher, Ashbery was born and raised in upstate New York.  He graduated from Harvard University in 1949 and received his Master's at Columbia University just a couple of years before publishing his first collection of poems, the chapbook Turandot and Other Poems. 
He worked as a magazine editor and poet for years, continuing to publish his work with mixed success until 1975, when his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
In the succeeding decades, he has gone on to garner numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Gold Medal for Poetry and many fellowships and awards. 
Ashbery has published more than twenty collections of poems, and he is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College at Annandale-on Hudson, New York.