Karle Wilson Baker

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on October 13, 1878, she later made her life in Nacogdoches, Texas. She studied at the University of Chicago, where she worked with writer-teachers including William Vaughn Moody and Robert Herrick, and she began publishing poetry in the early 1900s.

Her reputation grew through frequent publication in major literary magazines, and several of her early books were issued by Yale University Press, including Blue Smoke and Burning Bush. She also wrote fiction and essays, and her 1931 collection Dreamers on Horseback was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

She taught poetry at Stephen F. Austin State University and became an important literary figure in Texas. Readers still remember her especially for The Birds of Tanglewood, a graceful book of bird observations drawn from daily life in the East Texas landscape.