Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, on February 8, 1924, and came to the United States in 1939. She attended the University of Evansville in Indiana, where her father was a professor of French and German. 

Mueller’s books of poetry include Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Need to Hold Still (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), which received the National Book Award; and The Private Life (Louisiana State University Press, 1976), which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection. She also published several volumes of translation, including Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Milkweed Editions, 1990).

About Mueller’s poems Rita Dove said, “The disingenuous lyric whose darker undertones reverberate long after we have floated on its sunlit surface.”

Mueller’s other honors include the Carl Sandburg Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She taught at Elmhurst College, Goddard College, the University of Chicago, and Warren Wilson College. She lived in Lake Forest, Illinois, and died on February 21, 2020.