Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer.

A disciple of Marianne Moore, and a good friend of poets Robert Lowell and James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father's death and her mother's institutionalization, Elizabeth Bishop lived with her Canadian grandparents in Nova Scotia for a few years, and later with her father's family in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended The Walnut Hill School, and in 1934 graduated from Vassar College.

Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Houghton Mifflin poetry award in 1946 and, in 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, North & South - A Cold Spring. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the International Neustadt Prize for Literature.

Elizabeth Bishop traveled widely during her lifetime, living in New York, Key West, and, for sixteen years, in Brazil with her companion Lota de Macedo Soares.

Bishop often contributed articles to The New Yorker, and, in 1964, wrote the obituary for Flannery O'Connor in The New York Review of Books.

Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before moving to Harvard for seven years. She also taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Early in her career, Bishop was regarded by some as a 'miniaturist', a master of small poetic forms and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp-edged confessional sensibility; her own life story is told through poems which nominally address and describe other subject matter, including paintings, tourist destinations, etc. After her death in 1979, Bishop's reputation grew beyond the small critical fame she had developed during her lifetime.

Works

Poetry:

• North & South (1946)
• North & South - A Cold Spring (1955)
• Questions of Travel (1965)
• The Complete Poems (1969)
• Geography III (1976)

Other works:

• The Diary of Helena Morley (translation) (1957)
• Three Stories by Clarice Lispector (translation) (1964)
• Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (children's book) (1968)
• One Art (collected letters, posthumous) (1994)