In 1947 Mona Van Duyn co-founded
Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature with her husband, Jarvis Thurston. Moving to
St. Louis in 1950, they published it for another 30 years. Van Duyns first book of
poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, was published in 1959. One of the
nations preeminent poets, she won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the
Academy of American Poets fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Award. Van Duyn, whose poetry
finds large truths in small subjects, won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her
seventh book, Near Changes. In 1992 Mona Van Duyn was named Poet Laureate of the
United States.