DONALD HALL was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1951, and in 1953 his bachelor’s in literature from Oxford University. For the past thirty years he has lived on Eagle Pond Farm in rural New Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and mother were born. He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren. He was married for twenty-three years to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. In 1998, he published Without (Houghton Mifflin), a collection of poems expressing his grief over Kenyon’s death, for which The New York Review of Books wrote: “The mosaic of a whole period, with all its inner moods and its physical accessories, is masterfully accomplished.”

Hall has published fifteen books of poetry, beginning with Exiles and Marriages in 1955. In 2006, he published White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (Houghton Mifflin), a volume of his essential life’s work. Among his books for children, Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Medal. His twenty books of prose include Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (2003), The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005), and a collection of his essays about poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day (2003). He  was for five years Poet Laureate of his home state, New Hampshire and has written extensively about life there — Seasons at Eagle Pond (1987), Here at Eagle Pond (2000) and Eagle Pond (2007).

For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for his The Happy Man; both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for The One Day; the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is recipient of the Frost Medal and the Lamont Poetry Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Donald Hall was the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate, serving the post 2006-2007.



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