Photograph by Eric Lindbloom
Nancy Willard (1936 - 2017) was a poet, novelist, writer and teacher, best known for her poetry and children’s books. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Willard attended the University of Michigan and Stanford University for her undergraduate and graduate degrees. From 1965 - 2013 she taught in Vassar College’s English Department. Throughout her career she published 70 books of poetry and fiction. Among her many awards, A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (1982), was the first book of poetry to receive both a Caldecott Honor and a Newbery Medal.
Poetry Foundation – Nancy Willard Biography
”Nancy Willard, the award-winning, versatile author of dozens of volumes of children’s fiction and poetry, also wrote novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism for adults. The first recipient of a Newbery Medal for a volume of poetry, Willard mingled the “magical and the mundane” in a technique that “requires a leap of faith on the part of the reader,” according to Sybil Steinberg in a Publishers Weekly interview with the author. As E. Charles Vousden and Laura Ingram pointed out in their Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, “Everything [Willard] writes affirms her belief in the ‘magic view of life;’ that is, a view of life that incorporates the imagination and stresses the appropriateness of things meant to be taken metaphorically.””
To read the Poetry Foundation’s full biography, see the link below
Poetry Foundation – Nancy Willard