The recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Ford Foundation grants, May Swenson (1913-1989) received the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the International Poetry Forum Translation Medal, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and, a year and a half before her death, a MacArthur Fellowship. She published nine books of poetry. Mona Van Duyn said of her work, “May Swenson’s is an art that comes as close as any I know to what I like to think must have been the serious fun, the gorgeous mix of play and purpose of Creation itself.”
Hemelein Publications works:
- “The Beam” (poem) in Further Light, Issue 2 (2026)
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