Biography
Donald Justice (born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 - died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. He was for many years on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's preeminent graduate program in creative writing. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Justice was the author of ten books of poetry. The first book, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Award in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award in 1996.
His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.
On Poem
On Men At Forty
On Sestina: Here In Katmandu
On On The Death Of Friends In Childhood
On Bus Stop
On Ode To A Dressmaker's Dummy