Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books of poems, including four collections from Houghton Mifflin: Salvation Blues (2006), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, and a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Things That Happen Once (1996), finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Transparent Gestures (1989), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other awards include the Harper Lee Award, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new book, Village Prodigies, which combines techniques of poetry and fiction, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2017. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in New Orleans and Southern Illinois.