Ninety-year-old poet Eleanor Ross Taylor 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, 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 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, John Ashbery, Gerald Stern, Yusef Komunyakaa, current U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, C. K. Williams, Lucille Clifton, and Fanny Howe.

Today the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation announced its 2010 U.S. and Canada fellows, including twenty-eight literary writers. The fellowship winners, who can only receive the award once, include J. Allyn Rosser, whose work takes on traditonal forms and experimental, and poet-documentarian Mark Nowak; recent Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novelist Paul Harding and David Rhodes, who published his latest novel, Driftless, in 2008 after thirty-three years without publication; and creative nonfiction writers Maggie Nelson, who has also published five poetry collections, and memoirist and travel writer Tom Bissell.

The poetry fellows are:
Joel Brouwer
Angie Estes
Kimiko Hahn
Barbara Hamby
Juan Felipe Herrera
Nathaniel Mackey
Mark Nowak
Patrick Phillips
J. Allyn Rosser
Richard Tillinghast

The fellows in fiction are:
Lorraine Adams
Ethan Canin
Anthony Doerr
Nell Freudenberger
Paul Harding
Victor LaValle
Colum McCann
Joseph O’Neill
David Rhodes
Christine Schutt
Salvatore Scibona
Monique Truong

The creative nonfiction fellows are:
Tom Bissell
Peter Godwin
Molly Haskell
Maggie Nelson
Peter Trachtenberg
Irene Vilar

The amount of each writer's grant varies, but the average given last year in literature was upwards of thirty-six thousand dollars. Midcareer North American writers who have "demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts" are invited to apply for the fellowships through September 15. 

The winners of the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes in Letters, which award ten thousand dollars to each winner, were announced today. Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection Versed (Wesleyan University Press), which the judges called "striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading."

Paul Harding received the prize in fiction for his debut novel Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press). The fiction jury called his book "a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality."

The finalists in poetry are Lucia Perillo for Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press) and Angie Estes for Tryst (Oberlin College Press). Stephen Burt, Wesley McNair, and Maureen McLane judged. In fiction, runner-up honors went to Lydia Millet for Love in Infant Monkeys (Soft Skull Press) and Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton). Charles Johnson, Laura Miller, and Rebecca Pepper Sinkler judged.

In other awards news, the Los Angeles community-building organization Liberty Hill announced today that it would award its 2010 Upton Sinclair Award to novelist Walter Mosley. The author will receive the award, given to recognize work that contributes to social change, at a gala dinner in Los Angeles on May 20.

Mosley is the author of novels including Fearless Jones (Little, Brown, 2001), Fortunate Son (Back Bay Books, 2007), and Diablerie (Bloomsbury USA, 2007), and the story collection Six Easy Pieces (Washington Square Press, 2003), part of his series of books centered on a character named Easy Rawlins. A new novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in November.

Kafi Blumenfield, CEO of Liberty Hill, says that Mosley "has powerfully tackled such monumental events in Los Angeles like the Watts riots in his work and eloquently created an authentic picture of the social injustice being faced by African-Americans in our complicated city."

In the video below, Mosley talks about the responsibility of a writer with Chris Abani.

The Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University recently announced its Mount Saint Helens Field Residencies program for writers. The May 1 deadline is fast approaching for poets and prose writers whose work explores place and the natural world, and who are interested in writing "creative responses to the volcano and its varied landscapes."

Residents receive a stipend of one thousand dollars, a campsite at a meadow base camp—though writers must bring their own camping gear—located near Randle, Washington and the volcano; meals; and transportation around the residency site. The program, held from July 18 to 24, will take place at the same time as Mount Saint Helens Science Pulse, a conference of ecologists and field researchers who, in addition to doing their own fieldwork, will travel with writers on field trips and make time for more informal interactions.

The residency program is a companion to the Spring Creek Project's Long-Term Ecological Reflections program, which is rooted in tenets including, "That storytelling and poetry, observation and experiment, myth and mathematics are all authentic windows on the world."

Applications and more information about the residencies are available on the Spring Creek Project Web site.