Anthony Ostroff (1923-1978) was born in Gary, Indiana and educated at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne, and the University of Grenoble. Beginning in 1949 he taught for twenty years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he gained a reputation for speaking out against the Vietnam war. He was also a Visiting Lecturer at Vassar, and during the summer of 1958 taught two courses on modern poetry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Ostroff published poetry and short fiction in such magazines as Harper's, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, and Poetry, and received a grant by the National Association of Educational Broadcasting to produce a series of broadcasts on American Poetry. He edited The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic (1964), a collection of eight symposia in which poets comment critically on the work of other poets. In 1969 he became dean of faculty and vice president at Lewis and Clark College. Ostroff died in 1978 from a heart attack suffered after hang-gliding on the coast of Oregon. His published books of poetry and fiction include Imperatives (1962), A Fall in Mexico (1977), Islander (2000), and To Build a House (2003).