By Jennifer Nachbur Article published October 16, 2006
Poet Laureate Donald Hall will present the Templeton Lecture in Spirituality and Medicine on Tuesday, Oct. 24. Titled “Poetry, Medicine and the Spirit,” the lecture will take place at 4 p.m. in Ira Allen Chapel on the UVM campus. Overflow seating will be available in the Campus Center Theater in Billings.
The author of 15 books of poetry, including 1955’s Exiles and Marriages and the recent White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006, Hall is also the author of several children’s books, including Ox-Cart Man, which won the Caldecott Medal, and 20 books of prose. Hall was married for 23 years to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. In 1998, he published Without, a collection of poems expressing his grief over Kenyon’s death.
Hall was appointed 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the Library of Congress in June. In announcing the appointment, Librarian of Congress James Billington said, “Donald Hall is one of America’s most distinctive and respected literary figures. For more than 50 years, he has written beautiful poetry on a wide variety of subjects that are often distinctly American and conveyed with passion.”
Hall received the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for his poem “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 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in New Haven, Conn. in 1928, Hall received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1951, and bachelor’s in literature from Oxford University in 1953. 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.
Information: 847-2000
