Muriel Rukeyser

(1913 - 1980)

In 1933 poet Muriel Rukeyser drove from New York to Decatur, Alabama, to cover the second Scottsboro trials for the Student Review. Police discovered posters in her valise advertising a black student conference. She was arrested and contracted typhus while in jail. A Turning Wind, Rukeyser’s 1939 volume of poetry, touched on the lives of five innovators: “Americans—New Englanders,” she wrote, “whose value to our generation is very great and partly unacknowledged.”