Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then earned a B.A. from Harvard in 1951 and a B.Litt, from Oxford in 1953. Hall received an honorary PhD, Lit. from Bates College in 1991. He was editor of the magazine Oxford Poetry, the literary editor of Isis, the editor of New Poems, and the poetry editor of The Paris Review. Hall served as a member of the editorial board for poetry at the Wesleyan University Press from 1958 to 1964.
Donald Hall has published numerous books of poetry, most recently White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, The Painted Bed and Without: Poems. Other notable collections include The One Day, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, The Happy Man, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Exiles and Marriages, which was the Academy’s Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956. Donald Hall has also published various other works of fiction, poetry, children books, dramas, and memoirs.
His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall also served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. While teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan he met poet Jane Kenyon, whom he married in 1972. In December 1993, he and Jane Kenyon were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, “A Life Together.” In the June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Danbury, New Hampshire.
His poems “The Caption” and “And Now” appeared in Issue 3.2 Summer 1991.
