Mona Van Duyn

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet whose poetry looks at the everyday lives of common people with an ironic sense of wit. She uses formal structure in her poems, which often allude to literary figures. Her collections of poetry include To See, to Take (1970), A Time for Bees (1964), and Near Changes (1990), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Van Duyn won the Bollingen Prize for achievement in poetry in 1970 and in 1992–1993 she was Poet Laureate of the United States.

She earned her BA from Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa) in 1942 and her MA from the University of Iowa in 1943. She and her husband, Jarvis Thurston, created Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts in 1947.