American poet Frank O’Hara was BOTD in 1926. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he studied piano at the Boston Conservatory before serving in the US Navy during World War Two. After the war, he studied at Harvard University, befriending queer writers Edward Gorey and John Ashbery. In 1951, he moved to New York with his lover Joe LeSueur where he taught at the New School, worked at the Museum of Modern Art for over a decade, curating art shows and championing the Abstract Expressionists. He became a leading poet of the New York School, drawing inspiration from jazz and contemporary avant-garde art movements. Many of his most famous poems were written during his lunch breaks, including Having a Coke with You (“I look at you / and I would rather look at you / than all the portraits in the world“), written for his lover Vincent Warren. Openly gay since forever, he maintained relationships simultaneously with LeSueur and Warren and collected lovers like postage stamps, including the painter Larry Rivers. O’Hara died in 1966, aged 40, after being hit by a dune trolley on Fire Island. The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, published posthumously in 1971, won the National Book Award for Poetry. His work had a major surge in popularity in the 2000s after extracts of his poem Mayakovsky were quoted in an episode of hit TV series Mad Men.