Donald Hall, poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by President Obama. He was authors of dozens of books of poetry, essays, short stories, and textbooks. Before his death, he released two essay collections about the view from the vantage point of very old age: A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) and Essays After Eighty (2014).