Although born just miles northwest of New York City, Ms. Gregg grew up on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. She received both her Bachelor of Arts, in 1967, and her Master of Arts, in 1972, from San Francisco State College. Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981.
She was married to poet Jack Gilbert.
Her published books include Things and Flesh, Chosen By The Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma and Too Bright to See, as well as her most recent publication, In the Middle Distance (Graywolf Press, 2006). Her poems have also appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Ploughshares, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly.
She began teaching poetry at schools like Indian Valley College, University of Tucson, Napa State, and Louisiana State University. She has since taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Houston, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As of 2006, she was living in New York City, and until 2008 taught as a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program in the University Center for the Creative and Performing Artsat Princeton University.
"Linda Gregg brings us back to poetry. . . . She is original and mysterious, one of the best poets in America", says Gerald Stern.
Much of Linda Gregg's poetry is inspired by her extensive travels. Her work has received enormous critical praise for its soaring lyrical depictions of grief and loss, and the strange strengths and beauty she mines from them. Joseph Brodsky once stated that "[t]he blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stains the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do."
The poet Czes?aw Mi?osz has said, "I consider Linda Gregg to be one of the best American poets, and I value the neatness of design in her poems, as well as the energy of each line." W. S. Merwin confessed:
"I have loved Linda Gregg's poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance."