Alan Shapiro is the author of eight books of poetry: Tantalus in Love (2005) and Song and Dance (2002), both from Houghton Mifflin; The Dead Alive and Busy (2000), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Mixed Company (1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Covenant (1991); Happy Hour (1987), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Courtesy (1983), all from the University of Chicago Press; and After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981). His nonfiction includes the memoirs Vigil (1997) and The Last Happy Occasion (1996), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, both from the University of Chicago Press, and the collection of essays In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1993). He has also published a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus (Oxford, 2004). His awards and honors include two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, and has been a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. He is currently the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Photo by John Rosenthal