Diane Ackerman

Biography

Diane Ackerman is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses (Vintage, 1990) and The Zookeeper’s Wife: A Love Story (Norton, 2007), which won the Orion Book Award. Her many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Panes of Glass

By Diane Ackerman

America had many poets before Walt Whitman, but there was never an American poet before he held the country in the sea-to-sea embrace of his imagination, named its wonders like a latter-day Adam, proclaimed its common men and women to have...

POETRY / Autumn 1984

Climbing Out

By Diane Ackerman

Blue fluid in my limbs,
momentum buoys me up
at takeoff speed

POETRY / Autumn 1984

Lindbergh

By Diane Ackerman

Half his life he parachuted
from open cockpits in swamp fog,
and the other madly scouted