Mona Van Duyn

Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992.

Biography

Early years

Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921, in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. Continuing to edit Perspective until it ceased publication in 1975, they are recognized for their role in fostering literary talent nationwide and for publishing early works by Anthony Hecht, W. S. Merwin, Douglas Woolf, and many others. Van Duyn was a friend of poet James Merrill and instrumental in securing his papers for the Washington University Special Collections in the mid-1960s. She was a lecturer in the University College of Washington University in St. Louis until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year after she had published her fifth book of poems, she was named adjunct professor in the English Department and became the "Visiting Hurst Professor" in 1987, the year she was invited to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Career as a poet

Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the National Book Award (1971) for To See, To Take, She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. She died of bone cancer at her home in University City, Missouri, on December 2, 2004, aged 83. 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 Merciful Disguises:: Poems Published and Unpublished (Atheneum), 1973.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 Firefall (Knopf), 1992. If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959–1982 (Knopf), 1994. Selected Poems (Knopf), 2003.