Ruth Stone, an award-winning poet who published most of her work after the age of 70, died on November 19 of natural causes at her home in Ripton, Vermont, according to the Huffington Post. She was 96.

Born Ruth Perkins in Roanoke, Virginia in 1915, she married by age 19 and moved to Illinois, where she attended the University of Illinois in Urbana. After divorcing her husband, with whom she’d had one child, she later married and had two children with Walter Stone. She was widowed in 1959 after his suicide.

Her first collection, In an Iridescent Time, was published that same year. Her second book, Topography and Other Poems, was published over a decade later in 1971, and her third, American Milk, was released in 1986. 

Her poetry, which she considered a reflection of “that vast/confused library, the female mind,” received much acclaim later in her life. She won the National Book Award for In the Next Galaxy in 2002 and was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for What Love Comes To. She also received a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims, and a Whiting Award.

According to the Huffington Post, Stone once said of her work, “What I see and feel changes like a prism, moment to moment; a poem holds and illuminates. It is a small drama. I think, too, my poems are a release, a laughing at the ridiculous and songs of mourning, celebrating marriage and loss, all the sad baggage of our lives. It is so overwhelming, so complex."