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What is amazing to a reader of Lisel Mueller’s accomplished poetry isn’t that she won the Pulitzer Prize this month. It’s that the honor came as such a surprise. “I was bowled over,” Mueller says ...

Lisel Mueller, who fled Hitler’s Germany as a teenager and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in the United States, drawing on her family history for lyrical works about love, art, nature and loss — ...

Illinois poet Lisel Mueller is one of our country’s finest writers. The following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative of her poems of quiet celebration. bad news is set in distant ...

Lisel Mueller fled Germany at 15 and came to America, where she wrote in her poem "Curriculum Vitae": "In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them." She caught up and ...

Lisel Mueller blended themes of history and fate with reflections on nature, children’s fairy tales and folklore in poetry that won numerous awards including a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. “She was one of ...

In 1993, poet Lisel Mueller confessed to an interviewer that her eyes were so frail, she wrote in large, black letters with a felt-tipped pen so she could see her words. The weakness of her piercing ...

Lisel Mueller’s childhood was beautiful and terrifying. She “waded through pine cones and primrose marshes” in the countryside outside Hamburg, Germany. She adored going to school, and her home life ...

bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed.

Here’s an observant and thoughtful poem by Lisel Mueller about the way we’ve assigned human characteristics to the inanimate things about us. Mueller lives in Illinois and is one of our most ...