Donald Justice

JUSTICE, ROSS

Posted By: Tara (email)
Date: 7/3/2009 at 15:48:16

Donald Justice, 78, died August 6 at Greenwood Manor of pneumonia following a stroke. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.

He was born in Miami, FL in 1925, and attended the University of Miami, he studied also at the University of North Carolina, Stanford and the University of Iowa. He was a poet, and taught for many years in the Writers’ Workshop at the University, as well as at Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, and the University of Florida, and numerous conferences and workshops across the country, teaching many of the well-known poets of today.

He was the author of ten books of poetry; his Collected Poems will be issued this month by Knopf. The first book, The Summer Anniversaries, was the winner of the Lamont Award in 1961; Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award in 1996. He had received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

He composed music, and had work performed by the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa and by the Iowa City Chamber Orchestra. In his sixties he took up art, and his work was used on the covers of his later books. He was one of four poets whose art was featured in an exhibition at Hartwick College in 1999.

He is survived by his wife of fifty-six years, Jean Ross and a son, Nathaniel Justice and his wife Elizabeth of Black Mountain, N.C.

Burial will be private, with a memorial service at a later time. Memorial contributions may be made to the Iowa City Chamber Orchestra, the Crisis Center, Doctors Without Borders, or the Humane Society.

The family would like to thank Greenwood Manor for its kind care of him.