Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. Though she was never encouraged to read poetry by her parents or her teachers, Van Duyn adored nursery rhymes and greatly enjoyed the poems in her schoolbooks. Van Duyn attended Iowa State Teachers College (now University of Northern Iowa), and received her B.A. in 1942; she was awarded an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943. On August 31, 1943 she married Jarvis A. Thurston, a professor of English, and together they founded Perspective, a Quarterly of Literature in 1947; she was co-editor until 1970. Mona Van Duyn is the author of nine books of poems, which include Firefall (1994); If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (1994); Near Changes (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and To See, To Take (1970), which received the National Book Award.