On the back book jacket of Between Angels, Philip Booth states, “To read Stephen Dunn of an evening is to see the complexities of one’s own dailiness brought to light, lent focus, given voice.” This quote is helpful in describing the work of Mr. Dunn. Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who is sometimes referred to as the basketball playing poet.
Stephen Dunn was born on June 24, 1939 in Forest Hills, New York. He attended Hofstra University, where he played basketball and received a B.A. in history. Upon graduation in 1962, he played professional basketball for the Williamsport Billies in Pennsylvania. He did so until 1963, and then worked for a couple of years as an advertising copywriter in New York City. Later, Dunn entered a creative writing program at Syracuse University in 1968. After graduating from Syracuse in 1970, Stephen Dunn taught fiction at Southwest Minnesota State. From there he went on to teach creative writing at Stockton State College in Pomona, New Jersey. He did so from 1974 onward, and is now a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.
Stephen Dunn has written twenty collections of poetry. His works include The Insistence of Beauty; Local Visitations; Different Hours (winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 2001); Loosestrife (National Book Critics Circle finalist, 1996), and most recently, Lines of Defense. In 1995, Dunn received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other awards is the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Hofstra English 