U.S. Poet Laureate, 2006-2007
Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1928. He published more than 20 poetry collections, including Exiles and Marriages (1955), The Happy Man (1986), and The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He also wrote four biographies, three plays, more than 10 children’s books and short stories, and six memoirs. Hall edited more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies, including New Poets of England and America (with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, 1957) and Contemporary American Poetry (1962; revised 1972).
For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for The Happy Man; both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for The One Day; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in 1994; two Guggenheim Fellowships; and the National Medal of Arts. Hall lived in Wilmot, New Hampshire, until his death in 2018.
Audio Recordings with Donald Hall
- Donald Hall and Etheridge Knight reading their poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, February 25, 1986
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, Donald Hall and Charles Simic reading their poems in the Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, March 4, 1999