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Donald Justice, UI Graduate 54PhD

Prize Work: Selected Poems; Pulitzer Prize: 1980 Poetry

Donald Justice (born 1925, died 2004) was an American writer.

Author Biography -

Donald Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925. A graduate of the University of Miami, he attended the universities of North Carolina, Stanford, and Iowa. His books include New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); A Donald Justice Reader (1991); The Sunset Maker (1987), a collection of poems, stories and a memoir; Selected Poems (1979), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize; Departures (1973); Night Light (1967); and The Summer Anniversaries (1959), which received the Academy's Lamont Poetry Selection.

He has held teaching positions at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa, and from 1982 until his retirement in 1992, he taught at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991 and has received grants in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. He lived with his wife, Jean Ross, in Iowa City, until his death on August 6, 2004.

(Source: poets.org)

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New and Selected Poems by Donald Justice.

Learn More About Justice's Prize Winning Work

Selected Poems by Donald Justice

Book Description
In 1959, Justice's first collection won the Lamont Prize; 20 years later his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer. In 1987, The Sunset Maker (poems and other works) appeared and A Donald Justice Reader, another selection of mostly poems, followed in 1991. This collection features works culled from six previous titles, plus a dozen uncollected poems, among them a pantoum and sonnet (among the 15 poems labeled new are three from Reader, with only minor changes here). Meter and rhyme are featured throughout. If not using - often irregularly - a classic form, Justice improvises one, melding language, meaning and rhythm in a seemingly seamless whole.

Listen to Justice Read
Listen to "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy" in Justice's own words at poets.org.
Listen>>

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Bibliography - Donald Justice

Collected Poems (2004)

Night Light (1967)

Departures (1973)

Selected Poems (1979)

The Sunset Maker (1987)

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External Links on Donald Justice

• Donald Justice on Poemhunter.com

• An Essay on Donald Justice by Mark Jarman

• An Interview with Donald Justice

• Donald Justice on NNDB

• Donald Justice Papers at the University of Delaware

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