About Donald Hall
Donald Hall (September 20, 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut – June 23, 2018 in Wilmot, New Hampshire) was an American poet and the 14th United States Poet Laureate succeeding Ted Kooser in June 2006. He tooked up the post in October. In 2007 his successor, Charles Simic, stepped in. Hall had studied at Harvard University and also at Oxford University. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (since 1989) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1996). Hall published fifteen books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone (2006), The Painted Bed (2002) and Without: Poems (1998), which was published on the third anniversary of Kenyon's death. Most of the poems in Without deal with Kenyon's illness and death, and many are epistolary poems. In addition to poetry, he also wrote several memoirs (among them Life Work and String Too Short to be Saved), children's books (notably Ox-Cart Man, which won the Caldecott Medal), and a number of plays. His recurring themes include New England rural living, baseball, and how work conveys meaning to ordinary life. He is regarded as a master both of received forms and free verse, and a champion of the art of revision, for whom writing is a craft, not merely a mode of self-expression.He was for five years Poet Laureate of his home state, New Hampshire (1984–89), and among the many other honours and awards to have come his way were: the Lamont Poetry Prize for Exiles and Marriages (1955), the Edna St Vincent Millay Award (1956), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1963–64, 1972–73), inclusion on the Horn Book Honour List (1986), the Sarah Josepha Hale Award (1983), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1987), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1988), the NBCC Award (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (1989), and the Frost Medal (1990). He was nominated for the National Book Award on three separate occasions (1956, 1979 and 1993). In 1994, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement.
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