James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. His first book, The Lost Pilot, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1967. Tate wrote nineteen books and won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award. He served as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tate lived in Pelham, Massachusetts, and taught for years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.