English professor awarded coveted poetry prize

Sherod Santos, the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program and Center for the Literary Arts, recently received the prestigious Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize for his book, The Pilot Star Elegies.

Given to the best book of poetry published in the three preceding calendar years, the prize was awarded for the first time in May 1968 to Howard Nemerov. Billy Collin, Poet Laureate of the United States, will present the prize to Santos on October 17 in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke’s birthplace.

Santos earned master’s degrees from San Diego State University in 1974 and the University of California-Irvine in 1978, and his doctorate from the University of Utah in 1982. He is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather (1982), The Southern Reaches (1989), The City of Women (1993) and The Pilot Star Elegies (1999), which, besides receiving the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award. Santos’ book of essays, A Poetry of Two Minds (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Santos’ poems appear regularly in such journals as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, and The New York Times Book Review. Santos is a recipient of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the Discovery/The Nation Award and the Oscar Blumenthal Prize. In 1984, he was appointed a Robert Frost Poet. Santos has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

2002

Additional links:

Sherod Santos
English Department
Center for Literary Arts

Norton Poets online

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