Mona Van Duyn

One of America's most respected and honored poets, Mona Van Duyn (1921 - 2004) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1992 to 1993. Born and raised in rural Iowa, she was drawn to literature at an early age, but her parents were unsympathetic to her literary ambitions. At Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), a sympathetic teacher encouraged her writing. She earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa, where she participated in the early years of the University's famous Writers' Workshop and met her husband, Jarvis Thurston. The couple founded Perspective: A Quarterly Review of Literature while teaching at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. They and their journal soon moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Van Duyn would teach for much of her life. Over the years, Van Duyn won every major award in American poetry, including the Bollingen Prize, the Sandburg Prize and the National Book Award. She received a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her