American poet

Raúl R. Salinas (March 17, 1934 - February 13, 2008), better known by his pen name raúlrsalinas, was a Chicano pinto poet, memoirist, social activist, and prison journalist. Much of raúlrsalinas' writing was grounded in arguments for social justice and human rights. He was an early pioneer of Chicano pinto (prisoner) poetry and is notable for his use of vernacular, bilingual, and free verse aesthetics.Alongside Ricardo Sánchez, Judy Lucero, Luis Talamantez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, raúlrsalinas sought to make prisoners' rights a more central focus of the Chicano Movement. Incarcerated for over a decade (1959–1972) for carrying a small amount of marijuana, raúlrsalinas wrote extensively while in prison, including essays, letters, prose, and journalism, the vast majority which is now held at Stanford University. raúlrsalinas' work extended beyond his prison writing, focusing also on his Xicanindio (indigenous identified Chicano) heritage and his politics as a Latino internationalist. According to Oxford University, raúlrsalinas "transformed elements of the American literary canon."

Arthur Franklin Mapes was a poet who lived between 16 March 1913 and January 4, 1986. Among his works is the poem "Indiana," adopted as the Official State Poem of Indiana in 1963. In 1977, he was designated Indiana State Poet Laureate, a position that was not officially recognized by the State of Indiana until July 1, 2005. Much of his poetry reflected his humble beginnings and the love he had for his hometown, Kendallville, and state. His poetry also reflected his feelings on God, family, and nature. Many of his poems were printed in national and international publications.Mapes was born and raised in Kendallville in a family of eight children. He married Ruth Acker and had ten children. He worked at Flint & Walling, Inc. for many years as a mechanic. During his career, he won eight awards at the state, national and international levels, which include The Golden Quill Award of 1965 for the poem '"Winter Cavern." He was a member of the Indiana Poetry Society, the Poets' Corner, and was a columnist for Cornucopia Poetry Magazine.
In 1980, his collected poetry was published in a limited-edition hardcover book, Indiana Memories. Posthumously, his family published several topical paperback volumes. His poetry can be viewed today on a website created and maintained by his granddaughter, Angela Mapes Turner.

Philip D. Appleman (8 February 1926 – 11 April 2020) was an American poet and writer. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington.
He published seven volumes of poetry, the first of which was Summer Love and Surf and the latest of which is Perfidious Proverbs (Humanity Books, 2011); three novels, including Apes and Angels (Putnam, 1989); and half a dozen nonfiction books, including the widely used Norton Critical Edition, Darwin and the Norton Critical Edition of Malthus' Essay on Population. His poetry and fiction have won many awards, including a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Friend of Darwin Award from the National Center for Science Education, and the Humanist Arts Award of the American Humanist Association, and have appeared in scores of publications, including Harper's Magazine, The Nation, New Republic, New York Times, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Yale Review.
He has given readings of his poetry at the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Museum, the Huntington Library, and many universities. He read several of his poems on the July 6, 2012, episode of Moyers & Company.
He was a founding member of the Poets Advisory Committee of Poets House, New York, a former member of the governing board of the Poetry Society of America, and a member of the Academy of American Poets, PEN American Center, Friends of Poets & Writers, Inc., and the Authors Guild of America.
Appleman wrote many poems drawing on the work of Charles Darwin. In 2003 he signed the Humanist Manifesto.Appleman died in April 2020 at the age of 94.

James L. White (March 26, 1936 – July 13, 1981) was an American poet, editor and teacher.

Mildred Vorpahl Baass (April 15, 1917 – November 4, 2012) was an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Texas from 1993 to 1995.Baass was born in San Antonio, Texas, on April 15, 1917, to Alfred H. Vorpahl Sr. and Ida M. Keller Vorpahl. She was widowed during her first marriage when her husband, Lt. A. M. Hutchison Jr. of the United States Army Air Forces, was shot down and declared killed in action during World War II. She married her second husband, Judge Alfred C. Baass, on May 9, 1946. Baass had two daughters, Carol Sowa and Nancy Baass.A resident of Victoria, Texas, Mildred Vorpahl Baass died on November 4, 2012, at the age of 95.

Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël.
Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.
As an artist and poet, Emmett Williams collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. One of his notable pieces from this period is "Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices" (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase "You just never quite know", and say their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together with the beat of a metronome: when a black circle appears on the grid, the performer speaks the word, and when no circle appears they say nothing. In the resulting performance, the core phrase "you never quite know" is overshadowed by other combinations of words, such as "you know" and "quite just".In the 1960s, Williams was the European coordinator of Fluxus and worked closely with French artist Robert Filliou, and a founding member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris, France. His work appeared in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. Williams was friends with Václav Havel during his dissident years' he translated some of Havel's work into English. Williams was a guest artist in residence teaching at Mount Holyoke College from September 1975 to June 1976.
Williams' theater essays appeared in Das Neue Forum, Berner Blatter, Ulmer Theater, and other European magazines. He translated Daniel Spoerri's Topographie Anecdotee du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), collaborated with Claes Oldenburg on Store Days, and edited An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, all published by the Something Else Press, which was owned and managed by fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s Williams was Editor in Chief of the Something Else Press.
In 1991, Williams published an autobiography, My Life in Fluxus - And Vice Versa, published by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, and reprinted the next year by Thames and Hudson.
In 1996, he was honored for his life work with the Hannah-Höch-Preis. He died in Berlin in 2007.
In 2014, Edition Zédélé published a reprint of SOLDIER (Reprint Collection, curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot), first published in A Valentine for Noel (1973) by Something Else Press and Hansjörg Mayer.

Joseph Langland (February 16, 1917 – April 9, 2007) was an American poet.

Henri Coulette (November 17, 1927 – March 26, 1988) was an American poet and educator. His first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (Scribner, 1965), was greeted with acclaim and won the Lamont Poetry Prize. His second collection, The Family Goldschmitt (Scribner, 1971), seems to have received little attention, and it has been reported that much of the print run was accidentally pulped. He did not publish another book during his life, but had been organizing a volume when he died. Of these later poems, Tad Richards has written, "Though only in his fifties, he surveys the territory of death, particularly in the near-perfect 'Petition,' an elegy for his cat, with a concreteness he did not often find in life." Two of Coulette's poems, "Night Thoughts" and "Postscript", were included in the 2003 anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present; the editors write that "Coulette melded seamless metrics with a lifelong devotion to California icons like the LBG-30 (a Glendale computer), the noir Los Angeles memorialized by Raymond Chandler, and the gravesites of Hollywood movie stars."Coulette was born in Los Angeles, California, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1952 from Los Angeles State College, now known as California State University, Los Angeles. He studied at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, after which he returned to California. He spent nearly his entire career as a faculty member at California State University, Los Angeles. After Coulette's death (in South Pasadena, California, at 60), the poets Donald Justice and Robert Mezey edited and published Coulette's collected poetry. The collection included a wealth of unpublished poems, and was published in 1990 by the University of Arkansas Press.