A prodigiously diversified writer, Robert Penn Warren was the first poet laureate of the United States and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry and ten novels, including All the King's Men, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905 and died in Stratton, Vermont, in 1989.

John Burt is the editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren and the author of four books of poems. He is professor of English at Brandeis University, where he has taught since 1983.