Donald Justice

Donald Justice studied at University of Miami and Miami High School. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Princeton University, University of Florida and Syracuse University. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets.

• Name — Donald Justice • Born — 12 August 1925 • Birthplace — Miami, Florida, U.S. • Died — 6 August 2004 • Place of death — Iowa City, Iowa, U.S. • Field — Poetry • Workplaces — University of Florida Syracuse University • Education — University of Miami (BA) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (MA) Stanford University University of Iowa (PhD) • Prizes — Guggenheim Fellowship Pulitzer Prize

Justice was born on August 12, 1925, in Miami. He attended the University of Miami, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1945. He received an MA from the University of North Carolina in 1947, studied for a time at Stanford University, and earned a doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1954.

After obtaining his doctorate, Justice went on to teach for many years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's first graduate program in creative writing. He also taught at Syracuse University, the University of California, Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida. Justice published thirteen collections of his poetry. The first collection, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize given by the Academy of American Poets in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996. His honors also included grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. His Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award in 2004. Justice was a National Book Award Finalist three times, in 1961, 1974, and 1995.

Justice died August 6, 2004, at an Iowa City, Iowa nursing home. He had been in a nursing home after suffering a stroke several weeks before his death. He was 78 years old. His family said the immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but that he also had Parkinson's disease.

Justice edited posthumous selections of unpublished poetry for four poets: Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette, Raeburn Miller, and Joe Bolton. * • The first edition of this collection was published in 1960. * * *

• The Young God - A Vaudeville (opera by Edward Miller), 1969 • The Death of Lincoln: an opera by Edwin London on an original libretto by Donald Justice, 1988

• The Old Bachelor and Other Poems (Pandanus Press, Miami, FL), 1951. • The Summer Anniversaries (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT), 1960; revised edition (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH), 1981. • A Local Storm (Stone Wall Press, Iowa City, IA, 1963). • Night Light (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967); revised edition (University Press of New England, Hanover, NH, 1981). • Sixteen Poems (Stone Wall Press, Iowa City, IA, 1970). • From a Notebook (Seamark Press, Iowa City, IA, 1971). • Departures (Atheneum, New York City, 1973). • Selected Poems (Atheneum, New York City, 1979). Included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. • Tremayne (Windhover Press, Iowa City, IA, 1984). • The Sunset Maker (Anvil Press Poetry, 1987).. • A Donald Justice Reader (Middlebury, 1991).. • New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 1995).. • Orpheus Hesitated beside the Black River: Poems, 1952-1997 (Anvil Press Poetry, London, England), 1998. • Collected Poems (Knopf, 2004)..

• Platonic Scripts, 1984 • Oblivion: On Writers and Writing, 1998 • Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody. ed. David Koehn & Alan Soldofsky (Omnidawn, 2017).