Mona Van Duyn

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 Northern Iowa University in 1942, and an M.A. from the 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 they began Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature in 1947 and shifted that journal to Washington University in St. Louis when they moved there in 1950. Van Duyn was a lecturer in the University College adult education program until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year after she had published her fifth book of poems, she was named an adjunct Professor in the English Department and became the "Visiting Hurst Professor" in 1987, the year she was invited to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Van Duyn was a friend of poet James Merrill and was instrumental in securing his papers for the Washington University Special Collections in the mid 1960s. She died of bone cancer, aged 83.