Dorianne Laux

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Dorianne Laux (b. January 10, 1952 in Augusta, Maine) is an American poet.

She worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Her fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W. W. Norton & Company) is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States in the previous year.

Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke, (2000). She is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997).

Her first book, Awake, long out-of-print, will be re-issued by Eastern Washington University Press, and Red Dragonfly Press published Superman: The Chapbook in 2007.^{[citation needed]} Her work has appeared in the Best of The American Poetry Review and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and has been included twice in Best American Poetry.

She has been awarded with a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. She was formerly a member of the University of Oregon's creative writing faculty.

She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, poet Joseph Millar and has a daughter, Tristem.