Poet Alice Notley was born in Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. After earning her BA from Barnard College and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Notley traveled extensively around the US and abroad. In 1972 she married the poet Ted Berrigan and had two sons with him, the poets Anselm and Edmund Berrigan. Her early work can explore the cultural demands of domesticity with both lyricism and a commitment to formal experimentation. She has described her project from these years as presenting the voice of “the new wife, and the new mother.” Active in the New York poetry scene of the 1970s, Notley is often identified with the so-called second generation New York School poets, though her work also shows the influence of Modernist writers like William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Taking on themes ranging from cultural politics to gender, Notley’s later style has evolved into a formally ambitious attempt to transcribe thought itself. According to Joel Brouwer in the New York Times, the “radical freshness” of Notley’s poems “stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet’s restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next without any irritable reaching after reason or plot.”

Notley has published over 25 books of poetry, including Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006), awarded the Lenore Marhsall Poetry Prize; Disobedience (2001), awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Mysteries of a Small House (1998); The Descent of Alette (1996); Close to me & Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère (1995); To Say You (1994);  Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993); The Scarlet Cabinet (with Douglas Oliver, 1992); Homer's Art (1990); At Night the States (1988); Parts of a Wedding (1986); Margaret and Dusty (1985);  and Sorrento (1984).

In addition to the Marshall and Griffin prizes, Notley has received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1983 she married the British poet Douglas Oliver. She currently lives in Paris.