Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California. She studied poetry under Thom Gunn at the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1966, she won the Robert Frost Fellowship and published Discrepancies and Apparitions. Her forty-plus volumes of poetry include: Argonaut Rose, The Emerald City of Las Vegas, Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, Jason the Sailor, Medea the Sorceress, and Toward a New Poetry.