Mona van Duyn (1921 - 2004)

The poet Mona Jane Van Duyn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors, died December 1, 2004 at her home in University City, Missouri at the age of 83. Van Duyn served as the first female Poet Laureate of the United States (1992-1993) and was a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

After Van Duyn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for Near Changes, Cynthia Zarin wrote in The New Republic: "Since 1959 Mona Van Duyn has been writing poetry notable for its formal accomplishment and for its thematic ambition. The searching intelligence of the persona we have learned to know in her poems, combined with the humor, technical ease, and the blend of the abstract and the quotidian that the poet has made her own have resulted in that rare good thing: a strong, clear voice, original without eccentricity."

Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921. She is the author of ten books of poems:

• Selected Poems (2002);
• Firefall (1994);
• If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1994);
• Near Changes (1990);
• 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.

Van Duyn 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.