Joe Milford Hosts Alan Shapiro

Alan Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poems: After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981), The Courtesy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Happy Hour (University of Chicago Press, 1987) which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Mixed Company (University of Chicago Press, 1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, The Dead Alive and Busy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University, Song and Dance, which Houghton Mifflin published in February, 2002, and which won the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, as did his next collection, Tantalus in Love (2205). His most recent book, Old War, appeared in 2008; and new book, Night of the Republic, is due out from Houghton Mifflin in 2011. Shapiro is the author of three books of prose, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1993), The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997, and Vigil (Chicago, 1997), a memoir about his sister’s death from breast cancer, and winner of the New England Bookseller’s Discovery Designation. The poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro has published (with Oxford) a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus and The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.