Tavern Books author
W. S. Di Piero got some great and well-deserved news the other day! He's been named the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner by the Poetry Foundation, one of the nation's most prestigious awards honoring the life and work of a living poet. Di Piero's had many irons in the fire over his career. He's been publishing a steady stream of thoughtful art criticism for decades, he's been publishing a wide array of essays (both personal and cultural) for decades, he's been publishing amazing volumes of Italian poetry in translation for decades, and, of course, he's the author of numerous collections of poetry. The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is a lifetime achievement award, which may seem a bit odd, given that Di Piero is a young buck. But, if you stand back and admire the Di Piero corpus, you can easily see that his lifetime of admiring, loving, making, and writing about art is an accomplishment and a way of life that few have the talent or courage to take part in.
When Di Piero gave us his blessing to publish his translation of Leonardo Sinisgalli's selected poems,
Night of Shooting Stars, we knew we had something special. This book is one that we constantly talk about, and it's a title that Tavern Books fans often rave about. Really, it's one of the finest books we've published, and it's a volume that has come, and will continue, to define Tavern Books. For further reading, check out his recently released
Nitro Nights from Copper Canyon Press.
Our hats off to W. S. Di Piero!
Here's a
link to the Poetry Foundation's announcement of the Ruth Lilly Prize.
