Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender, and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, and American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation." Anne Sexton famously described her as "beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone"; Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."
One of Rukeyser's most powerful pieces was the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), which documented the details of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
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