Donald Justice (born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 - died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. He was for many years on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the nation's preeminent 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. Justice was the author of ten books of poetry. The first book, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Award in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award 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.
Major works include these volumes of poetry:
The Summer Anniversaries, 1960 Night Light, 1967 Departures, 1973 Selected Poems, 1979 The Sunset Maker, 1987 A Donald Justice Reader, 1991 New and Selected Poems, 1995 Collected Poems, 2004 Essay and interview collections:
Oblivion: On Writers and Writing, 1998 Platonic Scripts, 1984 Edited volumes:
Contemporary French Poetry (with Alexander Aspel), 1965 The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, 1960 Libretti:
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 Reference: "A Note on Donald Justice" (biographical sketch).
