MONA VAN DUYN Biography - Famous Poets and dancers

 
 

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MONA VAN DUYN

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She is the author of nine       
books of poems: Firefall (1994); If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1994);
Near Changes (1990), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; Letters From a Father, 
and Other Poems (1982); Merciful Disguises (1973, reissued 1982); Bedtime         
Stories (1972); To See, To Take (1970), which received the National Book Award;   
A Time of Bees (1964); and Valentines to the Wide World (1959). With her husband, 
Jarvis Thurston, she founded Perspective, a Quarterly of Literature in 1947, and   
co-edited it until 1970. She has been awarded the Bollingen Prize, the Hart       
Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National       
Institute of Arts and Letters, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice   
Tietjens Award from Poetry, and the Shelley Memorial Prize, as well as             
fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and   
Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.     
She has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor   
of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.