Hailed by critics as "Ireland's premier woman poet," Eavan Boland is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including The Lost Land (W.W. Norton, 1998), An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (1996), and In A Time Of Violence (1994).

In addition to her poetry, she has also written a volume of prose entitled Object Lessons: The Life Of The Woman And The Poet In Our Time (1995), and was co-editor of The Making Of A Poem: A Norton Anthology Of Poetic Forms (2000), with Mark Shad. Her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review.

Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944, and graduated from Trinity College in 1966. She has taught at Trinity College, University College, Bowdoin College, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is on the board of the Irish Arts Council and a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, and is a member of the English Department at Stanford University.