Coauthor of The Poetic Species, Edward O. Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist, and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Social Conquest of Earth and Anthill: A Novel, as well as the Pulitzer Prize–winning On Human Nature and (with Bert Hölldobler) The Ants. For his contributions in science and conservation, he received more than 100 awards from around the world.
Coauthor of The Poetic Species, Robert Hass has served as United States Poet Laureate and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has published many books of poetry, including Time and Materials, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Hass is co-founder of River of Words, an environmental education program for children, and a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.
Robert Hass was born in 1941 in San Francisco. He served as US Poet Laureate in 1995-97. His many awards include a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Time and Materials (2007), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sun Under Wood (1996). His first collection Field Guide was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1973. His latest book of poetry is The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems (Ecco, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011). Hass also worked with Czeslaw Milosz to translate a dozen books of Milosz's poetry, including Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) and Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns (2007). He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.