:: Richard Hugo was born in 1923 in Washington State. As a child, he loved books, baseball and fishing. He volunteered for World War II, where he served as a bombardier. After the war, he began his studies at the University of Washington, where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in creative writing. After finishing his coursework, Hugo began serving as a technical writer for Boeing. His first book of poetry, A Run of Jacks, was published in 1961. Shortly after, Hugo began teaching creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. He taught there for nearly eighteen years and his poetry addressed the landscape and population of his surroundings. In 1977, he was named the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. Richard Hugo died in 1982 of leukemia. He was fifty-eight.