Louise Gluck is an American Poet Laureate, appointed by the Library of Congress in 2003. She was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. Her father was creative in a different way; he helped to invent and market the X-Acto Knife.

Gluck graduated from George W. Hewlett High School in 1961. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, but transferred to Columbia University. She has authored eleven books of poetry, including Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry, The Wild Iris (1992) which earned the Prize and other awards, and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which was awarded the National Books Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award.

Her earliest work was published in an anthology entitled The First Four Books. Gluck has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and theories: Essays on Poetry (1994). In 2001 Gluck was honored by Yale University with the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. she has also received fellowships from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Guggenheim, and the Rockefeller foundations, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

She was named Poet Laureate from 2003-2004. She has taught at Williams College since 1983, teaching courses in the writing of poetry and in contemporary poetry as the Margaret Bundy Scott Senior Lecturer in English. Her work has been described as having a strong and haunting presence, without containing confessional material, nor intellectual. Some have found her work disturbing, since Gluck often writes from the first-person standpoint, and expresses anger, frustration, and disaffection. However, she is frequently praised for tackling archetypcal subjects, such as myth, fairy tales, and the Bible. Some admirers still criticize her forays into cliche, bordering on generic and triteness. At least one literary critic praises Gluck's work as poetry that never fails to capture the reader's attention and hold it.

Her work, some claim,is such that many people can relate to and understand in ways that are intense and rewarding. Critic Wendy Lesser praises Gluck's direct approach with poetry and that the strength of her voice "derives in large part from its self-centeredness -- literally, for the words in Gluck's poems seem to come directly from the center of herself."