Mona Van Duyn
Mona Van Duyn | |
---|---|
Born | Waterloo, Iowa, US | May 9, 1921
Died | December 2, 2004 | (aged 83)
Education | University of Northern Iowa (BA) University of Iowa (MA) |
Occupation(s) | Poet Professor |
Employer(s) | University of Louisville Washington University in St. Louis |
Title | United States Poet Laureate |
Term | 1992-1993 |
Awards | National Book Award (1971) Bollingen Prize (1971) Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1989) Pulitzer Prize (1991) |
Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed
Biography
Early years
Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921, in
Academic career
In St. Louis, Van Duyn taught English from 1950 to 1967 at Washington University.
Career as a poet
Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the
- It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities
- and everyone, down to the last man
- dreads it
But in "Late Loving", she wrote:
- Love is finding the familiar dear
To See, To Take (1970) was a collection of poems that gathered together three previous books and some uncollected work and won the National Book Award for Poetry.[5] In 1981 she became a fellow in the Academy of American Poets and then, in 1985, one of the twelve Chancellors who serve for life.[2] Collected poems, If It Be Not I (1992) included four volumes that had appeared since her first collected poems. It was published simultaneously with a new collection of poetry, Firefall.
In 1993, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[7] She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.[8] She died of
Works
- Valentines to the Wide World (The Cummington Press), 1959.
- A Time of Bees (University of North Carolina Press), 1964.
- To See, To Take: Poems (Atheneum), 1970 —winner of the 1971 National Book Award for Poetry[5]
- Bedtime Stories (Ceres Press), 1972.
- Merciful Disguises:: Poems Published and Unpublished (Atheneum), 1973.
- Letters From a Father, and Other Poems (Atheneum), 1982.
- Near Changes (Knopf), 1990 —winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry[6]
- Firefall(Knopf), 1992.
- If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959–1982 (Knopf), 1994.
- Selected Poems (Knopf), 2003.
References
- ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1991-2000". Library of Congress. 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-01. (Six women poets preceded her as Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Also see United States Poet Laureate.)
- ^ a b c d e f g "Van Duyn, Mona (1921–2004)." Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages, edited by Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, vol. 2, Yorkin Publications, 2007, p. 1916. Gale eBooks. Accessed 6 Sept. 2021.
- ^ Brockhoff, Dorothy. “Size and Quality of WU Writers' Colony May Rank First Among Nation's Campuses.” Washington University Record, November 21, 1974, pp. 3-4. Bernard Becker Medical Library Archives. https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/12. Also see Washington University in St. Louis, The Source Newsroom. Georges, Cynthia, “Obituary: Jarvis A. Thurston, 93; Professor of English.” February 15, 2008. https://source.wustl.edu/2008/02/obituary-jarvis-a-thurston-93-professor-of-english/
- ^ a b "Famous Iowans: Van Duyn, Mona". DesMoinesRegister.com. The Des Moines Register. Archived from the original on July 30, 2012. Retrieved May 16, 2010.
- ^ a b c
"National Book Awards – 1971". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
(With acceptance speech by Van Duyn and essay by Dilruba Ahmed from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ a b "Poetry". Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
- ^ St. Louis Walk of Fame. "St. Louis Walk of Fame Inductees". stlouiswalkoffame.org. Archived from the original on 31 October 2012. Retrieved 25 April 2013.
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter V" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 29, 2014.
External links
- Mona Van Duyn Papers at Washington University in St. Louis — with brief biography
- Mona Van Duyn Archived 2009-01-10 at the Wayback Machine pages at Modern American Poetry, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Mona Van Duyn at the Academy of American Poets
- Mona Van Duyn at the St. Louis Walk of Fame
- Mona Van Duyn Web Guide at the Library of Congress
- Mona van Duyn Biography and poems at the Poetry Foundation