Donald Justice (1925 - 2004)

Born 12 Aug 1925 in Miami, Dade, Florida, United States

Husband of Jean C (Ross) Justice — married 1947 in North Carolina, United States

Died 6 Aug 2004 at age 78 in Iowa City, Johnson, Iowa, United States

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Biography

Donald Justice is Notable.

Donald Justice (August 12, 1925 – August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing.

Donald Justice grew up in Florida, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami in 1945. He received an M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1947, studied for a time at Stanford University, and ultimately earned a doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1954. He 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 at Irvine, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Florida in Gainesville.

In 1947, he married Jean C. Ross. They had no issue.

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 also a National Book Award Finalist in 1961, 1974, and 1995.

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

Sources

• Find A Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com : accessed 03 November 2019), memorial page for Donald Justice (12 Aug 1925–6 Aug 2004), Find A Grave Memorial no. 15427362, citing Oakland Cemetery, Iowa City, Johnson County, Iowa, USA ; Maintained by Ken Saylor Jr. (contributor 46798923) .

• Saxon, Wolfgang (August 10, 2004). "Donald Justice, 78, a Poet Admired for Precise Beauty". The New York Times.

• Date of birth taken from the Social Security Death Index.

• "Notable University of Iowa Alums". University of Iowa. Archived from the original on 2010-07-23.

• Richards, Tad (2005). "Donald Justice," Archived December 2, 2008, at the Wayback Machine Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (Greenwood Press). ISBN 978-0-313-32381-2.

See Also:

• Wikipedia: Donald_Justice
• Wikidata: Item Q5294615, en:Wikipedia