Quotes & Awards

"The good poem illuminates its subject so that we can see it as the poet wished, and in ways he could not have anticipated. It follows that such illumination is twofold: the light of the mind, which the poet employs like a miner's beam, and that other light which emanates from the words on the page in conjunction with themselves, a radiance that the poet caused but can never fully control." - From Stephen Dunn's "The Good and Not So Good" in Walking Light


Stephen Dunn has been awarded Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Different Hours in 2001, the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts & Letters, Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, three NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Levinson and Oscar Blumenthal Prizes from Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the James Wright Prize from Mid-American Review, and many others.
He is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time these days in Frostburg, Maryland with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.