W.D. Snodgrass

William DeWitt Snodgrass, born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 5, 1926, was known to his friends as 'De'. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., then later served in the United States Navy. In 1949, he graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, staying in Iowa City afterwards to study with Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.

His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and a special citation from the Poetry Society of America, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His first collection of poetry, Heart's Needle, was published in 1959 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Since then, he has published numerous books of poetry, including Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2006); The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995); Each in His Season (1993); Selected Poems, 1957-1987; The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977) (a collection which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and produced by Wynn Handman for The American Place Theatre) and After Experience (1968).

Alumni |Faculty |Iowa Writers' Workshop
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