More Big Winner News: Eleanor Ross Taylor Wins Ruth Lilly Prize [1]
Ninety-year-old poet Eleanor Ross Taylor [2] is this year's recipient of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, given by the Poetry Foundation to recognize lifetime achievement. Taylor, who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, will be presented the award next month during the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago.
The May issue of Poetry [3], published by the Poetry Foundation, will feature a portfolio of Taylor's poems, many of which were out of print before Captive Voices, a book of her selected poems, was published last year—a volume that was shortlisted [4] for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her previous collections are Wilderness of Ladies (1960), Welcome Eumenides (1972), New and Selected Poems (1983), Days Going/Days Coming Back (1991), and Late Leisure (1999).
In an award citation, Poetry editor Christian Wiman noted the "spiritual largesse and…great inner liberty” of Taylor's poems. "We live in a time when poetic styles seem to become more antic and frantic by the day, and Taylor’s voice has been muted from the start," Wiman said. "Muted, not quiet."
Previous winners of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize include Adrienne Rich [5], John Ashbery [6], Gerald Stern [7], Yusef Komunyakaa, current U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan [8], C. K. Williams [9], Lucille Clifton [10], and Fanny Howe [11].