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Biography Mona Van Duyn

U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-1993

Mona Van Duyn
Mona Van Duyn, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-1993. Photo credit: Jarvis Thurston.

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She published 10 collections of poetry, including To See, To Take (1970), winner of the National Book Award; Near Changes (1990), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and Selected Poems (2003). She was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1985, and was the first woman appointed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1992-1993. Her other honors included fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, and the Eunice Tietjens Award. For over 15 years, Van Duyn was a lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She co-founded the quarterly literary journal Perspective in 1947 and served as co-editor until 1975. Mona Van Duyn died in 2004.

Audio Recordings of Mona Van Duyn

Selected Works at the Library of Congress