Mona Van Duyn biography
Date of birth : 1921-05-09
Date of death : 2004-12-02
Birthplace : Waterloo, Iowa, United States
Nationality : American
Category : Famous Figures
Last modified : 2011-11-28
Credited as : poet, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,
Mona Van Duyn was the first woman to be appointed poet laureate of the United States, serving from October 1992 to May 1993.
On the occasion of Mona Van Duyn's appointment as poet laureate, the Library of Congress' Information Bulletin (June 29, 1992) described the background of the position: "The Library keeps to a minimum the specific duties required of the Poet Laureate in order to afford each incumbent maximum freedom to work on his or her own projects while at the Library. Each brings a new emphasis to the position, which pays a stipend of $35, 000." Allen Tate (1943-1944), for example, served as editor of the library's now-defunct Quarterly Journal and edited the compilation Sixty American Poets, 1896-1944 during his tenure. Some consultants have suggested and chaired literary festivals and conferences; others have spoken at schools and universities and received the public in the Poetry Room. Before Van Duyn, six women had been poetry consultants: Leonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Josephine Jacobsen, Maxine Kumin, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She earned a B.S. degree from the University of Northern Iowa and an M.A. from the University of Iowa, where she took courses and taught in its famous Writers' Workshop in the 1940s. She had honorary doctorates of letters from Washington University, St. Louis, and Cornell College, Mount Vernon (Iowa). She founded Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature with her husband, Jarvis Thurston, in 1947 and continued as coeditor into the 1970s.
Van Duyn taught literature and creative writing extensively. From 1950 to 1967 she was lecturer in English at University College, Washington University. She also taught at the University of Louisville. She lectured at the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar in American Studies and at the Sewanee Writers and the Breadloaf Writing Conferences.
She was widely honored before assuming the laureateship. Her prizes include the Eunice Tietjens Award (1956), the Harriet Monroe Award of Poetry Magazine (1968), the Helen Bullis Prize (1964) from Poetry Northwest, the Hart Crane Memorial Award from the American Weave Press (1968), the first prize in the Borestone Mountain Awards Volume (1968), the National Book Award (1971), the Bollingen Prize (1970), the Loines Prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1976), the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America (1987), the Ruth Lilly Prize, the country's most remunerative award for poetry (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize for Near Changes in 1991.
The National Foundation for the Arts chose her as one of the first five poets to receive a grant. She held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971-1972. In 1980 the Academy of American Poets voted her a fellowship and named her a chancellor in 1985. In 1983 the National Institute of Arts and Letters elected her a member.
Van Duyn's books include Valentines to the Wide World (1959), A Time of Bees (1964), To See, To Take (1970), Bedtime Stories (1972), Merciful Disguises (1973), Letters from a Father and Other Poems (1983), and Near Changes (1990), Firefall: Poems (1993) and If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1993).
