Ai was born Florence Anthony in Texas in 1947. She was of mixed racial heritage including Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese. She received an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine in 1971. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and 1985, and the National Book Award for her poetry collection Vice in 1999. Her other works include Cruelty, Killing Floor, and No Surrender. From 1999 until her death, she was a professor at Oklahoma State University. She died of natural causes on March 20, 2010 at the age of 62.
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