Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. He earned a BA from Harvard University in Boston in 1951 and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford in England 1953. The next year he received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, followed by a fellowship from Harvard University.

in 1955 Hall published his first poetry collection, Exiles and Marriages (Viking Press), which was the Academy of American Poet's Lamont Poetry Selection for 1956. His other books include The Selected Poems of Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); and Without: Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998), which was published on the third anniversary of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon's death from leukemia and which received the 1999 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Other notable collections include The One Day (Mariner Books, 1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination andThe Happy Man (Secker & Warburg, 1986), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He was named Poet Laureate of the United States for 2006-2007. In 2009 he was awarded the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Of Hall's work, Billy Collins writes, "Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."