Born in Iowa at the end of the Great Depression, Ted Kooser's American mid-western sensibility has helped to inform his poetry as well as helped to make his work accessible to a wide range of readers. Indeed, his poems are often used in textbooks and anthologies used by secondary schools and colleges.

After growing up in a rural setting, he set off for college at Iowa State University, where he earned the Bachelor of Arts in English. He remained in the mid-west for graduate school, settling on the Master of Arts in English program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. While Kooser continued to write after college, for some years he had to take on the practicalities of working a day job. He chose the insurance industry, where he spent much of his working years as an insurance executive vice-president with Lincoln Benefit Life. He later revealed that he actually had more time to write poetry when he was working in insurance than he has had since working as a full time poet and writer.

Over the course of his career he has thus far authored ten collections of poetry, including his most recent, Delights & Shadows. His Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison won the 2001 Nebraska Book Award for poetry. He is also an author of fictional and non-fictional books. His book, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. Kooser is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. In 2004, the Library of Congress announced Kooser's appointment as United States Poet Laureate. In April 2005, he was chosen to serve an additional year in that same capacity. Later that month he received more good news: his book Delights and Shadows was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

According to an interview conducted by National Public Radio, Kooser is the first to acknowledge the challenges of writing poetry. He stated that he sits in a living room armchair, under a floor lamp, and coffee in hand. "And I just sit there...and work and see what happens," he said. "Nine days out of ten, nothing good comes of it at all. Maybe on the tenth day, if I'm lucky, some little thing will start a poem." While Kooser said he was generally productive with his writing, he was most interested in quality over quantity. "I feel that I'm really fortunate if at the end of a year, after writing every day, I have a dozen poems I care about," he said. "I don't have great expectations for what happens in those morning sessions. But, you know, if you're not there writing, it's never going to happen."

He currently teaches as a visiting professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He also hosts the newspaper project, American Life in Poetry. Kooser remains close to his geographical roots, and lives in rural Nebraska with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge.