Holds Upon Happiness

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. She and her family had to flee the Nazis and settled in Indiana, USA. Mueller won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her writing has “been praised for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd anglesand pulls you back into childhoodand you are passing a crumbling mansioncompletely hidden behind old willowsor an empty convent guarded by hemlocksand giant firs standing hip to hip,you know again that behind that wall,under the uncut hair…

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and then worked in advertising. He discussed how he switched from advertising to writing poetry in an interview with Poets and Writers. My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of becoming like the men who were around me. So I quit and went to Spain to write a novel, and wrote a bad one. But I was trying to write poetry too, and those efforts seemed more promising. The rest, as they say, is…