{"id":828,"date":"2012-01-17T16:28:22","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T20:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/?page_id=828"},"modified":"2013-05-06T16:45:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T20:45:42","slug":"about-donald-hall","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/about-donald-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Hall Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hall-02-small\"<\/a>Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut in 1928.\u00a0 A strong influence in Hall\u2019s early years was his maternal great-grandfather\u2019s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.<\/p>\n

Hall began writing early on, and continued to write throughout his prep school years at Exeter. At age sixteen, he attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he made his first acquaintance with the poet Robert Frost. That same year, he published his first work. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Hall served on the editorial board of The Harvard Advocate<\/em>, and got to know a number of literary figures, including John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich. Hall received a B.A. from Harvard in 1951.<\/p>\n

After leaving Harvard, Hall went to Oxford for two years. He was editor of the magazine Oxford Poetry<\/em>, literary editor of Isis<\/em>, editor of New Poems<\/em>, and poetry editor of The Paris Review<\/em>. He received <\/strong>a B.Litt. from Oxford in 1953.<\/p>\n

After returning to the United States, Hall went to Stanford, where he spent one year as a Creative Writing Fellow, studying under the poet-critic, Yvor Winters. Following his year at Stanford, Hall went back to Harvard, where he spent three years in the Society of Fellows. While teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he met poet Jane Kenyon, whom he married in 1972. Three years after they were wed, they moved to Eagle Pond Farm, his grandparents’ former home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. The couple, married for twenty-three years, lived and wrote side by side on their farm.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer. Though his chances for survival were slim, he eventually went into remission. In 1994, Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died fifteen months later. Kenyon\u2019s death had a profound effect on Hall and he has struggled to document his loss in both his poetry and prose.<\/p>\n

Among other fellowships and grants, he has twice been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also received 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). In 1994, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement. He has written and edited numerous books, ranging in subject matter from poetry and fiction to art history and sports, as well as children’s books and memoirs. He was for five years Poet Laureate of his home state, New Hampshire (1984\u201389), and he was appointed “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress” (commonly known as the Poet Laureate of the United States) in 2006. Hall was awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

Hall’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker<\/em>, The Atlantic Monthly<\/em>, Harper’s<\/em>, The Nation<\/em>, Kayak<\/em>, and Field<\/em>. Volumes of his verse include Exiles and Marriages<\/em> (the Lamont Poetry Selection of 1955), The Dark Houses<\/em>, A Roof of Tiger Lilies<\/em>, The Alligator Bride<\/em>, The Yellow Room<\/em>, The Town of Hill<\/em>, and A Blue Wing<\/em>. In addition to his accomplishments as a poet, Hall is respected as an academic who, through writing, teaching, and lecturing, has made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing. Two of his anthologies have had a profound impact upon both readers and writers of poetry in our time: New Poets of England and America<\/em>, and Contemporary American Poetry<\/em>. His early children\u2019s book, Ox-Cart Man<\/em> (1979), is one among several works that have established him in the field of children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n

Hall continues to live and work on his New Hampshire farm, a site that serves as both his home and an inspiration for much of his work.<\/p>\n

[Much of this biography is taken from the Poetry Foundation’s biography of Donald Hall<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n\n

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Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut in 1928.\u00a0 A strong influence in Hall\u2019s early years was his maternal great-grandfather\u2019s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet. Hall began writing early on, and continued to write throughout […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7168,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/828\/revisions\/7168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}