Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize. an elementary teacher, sustained the family. In 1935, her father was interrogated by the Gestapo for four days. Dependencies (1965)

Translation She published several volumes of translation, including Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1980) 1990: Carl Sandburg Award