Carolyn Maisel was born in Mississippi in 1942 and lived much of her life in Louisiana. During 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Louisiana. Carolyn Maisel passed away in March 2006, in Austin, Texas, after a brief battle with lung cancer.
She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and taught briefly at the University of New Orleans. Her poems were widely published in journals and magazines, including The New Yorker and The North American Review. In 1978, L’Epervier Press published Witnessing, her first full length collection of poems. Necessary Angels, Maisel’s second book of poetry, is two books in a single volume— Pig Woman, written in the 1970s, and Light and Shadow, completed just before her passing in 2006.