Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hesiod was an Ancient Greek poet who flourished around 700 BC, active somewhere between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role in his subject.
Hesiod wrote the Theogony, which tells the origins of the gods, their lineages, and Zeus's rise to power, and Works and Days, which describes the five Ages of Man and offers advice and wisdom. The Shield of Heracles was also attributed to him in antiquity but is now known to be spurious.
Hesiod lived at Ascra, a hamlet near Thespiae in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. He called it a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant. His father had crossed the sea from Cyme in Aeolis on the coast of Anatolia.
The Theogony concerns the origins of the world and of the gods, beginning with Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros, and traces the divine genealogies leading to Zeus's rise to power. It is the earliest known source for the myths of Pandora, Prometheus, and the Golden Age.
Two early traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One says the Delphic oracle warned he would die in Nemea, so he fled to Locris where he was killed at the temple of Nemean Zeus, while another tradition holds that he lies buried at Orchomenus in Boeotia.
Greeks in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC ranked their oldest poets as Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer in that order, but later writers began placing Homer earlier than Hesiod. Most scholars today agree with Homer's priority, though there are good arguments on either side.