Cooper was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and then moved with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. She attended Vassar College from 1942 to 1944, and earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. In 1953–54 Cooper took a year off to get an M.A. at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Robert Lowell, and John Berryman in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Cooper joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, in 1950, and remained as a teacher and poet in residence until her retirement in 1987. She held the post of New York State Poet from 1995 to 1997. She died on October 26, 2007, of complications due to Parkinson's Disease.

Julia Copus was born in London in 1969, grew up in Hampshire and now lives in Somerset. She has published two collections with Bloodaxe, The Shuttered Eye (1995), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and In Defence of Adultery (2003) – both of these Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

She has received many awards for her poetry, including an Eric Gregory Award, an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, and a BBC/Gulbenkian Foundation writer’s bursary. She won first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2003 with ‘Breaking the Rule’, and won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2010 with 'An Easy Passage'. Her radio plays include Eenie Meenie Macka Racka (2003), winner of the BBC’s prestigious Alfred Bradley Award, and The Enormous Radio (2008). She tutors regularly for the Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School and is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter.