Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman Poems

Diane Ackerman Biography

Diane Ackerman (born October 7, 1948 in Waukegan, Illinois) is an American author, poet, and naturalist known best for her work A Natural History of the Senses. Her writing style combines poetry, colloquial history, and popular science. She has taught at various universities, including Columbia and Cornell. Diane Ackerman lived in Waukegan, Illinois until she was 8, when her family moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A., M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1978, where her dissertation advisor was Carl Sagan. Over the years she taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell, Washington University in St. Louis, and other colleges. She has been married to novelist Paul West since 1970, whose stroke in 2006, became the basis of her book, One Hundred Names for Love (2011). She currently lives in New York state. A collection of her manuscripts, writings and papers (the Diane Ackerman Papers, 1971-1997—Collection No. 6299) is housed at the Cornell University Library. Ackerman's book A Natural History of the Senses inspired the five-part Nova miniseries Mystery of the Senses, which she hosted. In 2008 she won the Orion Book Award for The Zookeeper's Wife.)

The Best Poem Of Diane Ackerman

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

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