Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn was an American poet and educator whose career spanned more than four decades, producing twenty‑one collections of poetry that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2001 for Different Hours. Born on June 24, 1939 in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, he grew up playing basketball at Forest Hills High School and later at Hofstra University, where he was famously nicknamed “Radar” for his jump‑shot precision. After a brief stint with the Williamsport Billies of the Eastern Basketball Association and a period working in advertising, Dunn turned his focus to literature, earning an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1970. His first full‑length collection, Looking for Holes in the Ceiling, appeared in 1974, the same year he began teaching at Stockton University, a post he held for roughly thirty years while also lecturing at institutions such as Wichita State, the University of Washington, Columbia, Michigan, and Princeton. Over his prolific career he received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, underscoring his influence on contemporary poetry. He continued to publish acclaimed works like Loosestrife, The Insistence of Beauty, and Pagan Virtues, with his final manuscript, The Not Yet Fallen World, completed shortly before his death and released posthumously in 2022. His poems often explored everyday moments with quiet depth, balancing humor and melancholy, earning him a reputation as a poet of the common experience while maintaining a refined lyrical voice. Personal life saw Dunn married first to Lois Kelly in 1964, with whom he had two daughters, Susanne and Andrea; after their divorce in 2001, he wed Barbara Hurd in 2002. He lived in New Jersey before settling in Frostburg, Maryland, where he passed away on his 82nd birthday, after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.