Mona Van Duyn

Mona Jane Van Duyn (9 May 1921 – 2 December 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992. Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. degree from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. She and Thurston studied in the Ph.D. program at Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there. Together...