May Swenson

he recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ford Foundation grants, MAY SWENSON received the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the International Poetry Forum Translation Medal, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and, a year and a half before her death, a MacArthur Fellowship. She published nine books of poetry. Mona Van Duyn said of her work, "May Swenson's is an art that comes as close as any I know to what I like to think must have been the serious fun, the gorgeous mix of play and purpose of Creation itself. .