Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine

In 1968, Mona Van Duyn received the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, an award named for the influential founder of the journal.[1][9] This prize honored her distinguished contributions to the magazine and recognized the originality and technical precision of her verse.

The Monroe Prize reflected the high esteem in which Van Duyn’s work was held by one of the most important poetry venues in the English‑speaking world. At a time when the magazine was a central arbiter of poetic taste, such recognition meant that her poems were not only widely read but also regarded as exemplary by leading editors and fellow writers.[4][5]

The award came in a year of multiple honors, including the Hart Crane Memorial Award and Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards first prize, underscoring the extent to which her work had captured the attention of diverse literary institutions.[9] For a woman poet, accumulating such prizes in the late 1960s helped counter enduring gender biases within the literary field and cleared a path toward the major national awards she would win in subsequent decades. The Monroe Prize thus serves as an important marker of Van Duyn’s ascent into the top ranks of American poetry.