PLYMOUTH, NH – Donald Hall, former New Hampshire State Poet Laureate, will visit Plymouth State College to read at 3:00 PM on Sunday, March 9, 2003 in the Silver Cultural Arts Center for the Eagle Pond Author Series, a literary program named in his honor. Easily one of the most prominent names of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century literary world, he is the author of more than thirty books, as well as countless textbooks and anthologies, works of short fiction, essays, plays, poems, and approximately five thousand perennial letters. Including editing, Hall once estimated that he published an average of one piece per week and four books per year.
His abounding list of awards and honors is abbreviated with such poetic credits as the Lamont Poetry Prize (1955), the Edna St Vincent Millay Award (1956), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1963-64 and 1972-73), Horn Book Honour List (1986), the Sarah Josepha Hale Award (1983), the Lenore Marshall Award (1987) for The Happy Man, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1988), the NBCC Award (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (1989), the Robert Frost Silver Medal (1990) and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of the American Council of Arts.
Hall’s other credits include Caldecott Medal for his acclaimed children’s book, The Ox-Cart Man and the New England Book Award for Nonfiction for his stark autobiography, Life Work, published in 1993. He was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award by the New Hampshire Writers and Publishers Project and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Leaving the relative safety of his tenured position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Hall returned to his home state of New Hampshire to live on his family estate, Eagle Pond Farm in 1975 with his second wife, the eminent poet Jane Kenyon. In December, 1993 the couple was the subject of the Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, “A Life Together.” Jane Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995, a scant three years following the remission of Hall’s own cancer. His book Without: Poems, published in 1998 deals with the loss of his wife and fellow poet.
Hall, termed “staggeringly prolific” by Atlantic Monthly in 1996, might be labeled the quintessential New Hampshire poet were it not for his immense distaste for the classification, as told in his infamous interview with Ian Hamilton, released in February, 2000: “People call me a New Hampshire poet. Every adjective is a diminishment: women poets; men poets; black poets…Let there be one American poetry, and let the best poets stand out.”