Laura Riding Jackson was born in 1901 in New York City. She began her poetry career in the early 1920s when she attracted the notice of a literary group called The Fugitives, who hailed her work as “the discovery of the year.” In 1925, Jackson left the United States for England in order to work with poet and novelist Robert Graves. Two years later, Jackson and Graves founded their own small press, Seizin Press, and co-wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Their book outlined new methods of close textual analysis, which they further explored in Epilogue, a journal they edited together from 1935 to 1938. These new analytic methods would heavily influence the development of the New Criticism. Jackson published over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as several novels, volumes of short stories, essays, and criticism. She was awarded the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. The Bollingen Prize, which she received in 1991, was given to her in recognition of her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died in Florida in 1991.