Garrett to receive $10,000 Aiken Taylor Award for his poetry

Poet, novelist and essayist George Garrett, retiring this month as the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing in the English department, has been chosen to receive the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. The $10,000 prize, awarded to an American poet to honor the work of a distinguished career, is presented by the Sewanee Review, the nation's oldest literary quarterly.

The award, among the country's most prestigious for poetry, was established in 1986 through a bequest to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., by K.P.A. Taylor, brother of the poet Conrad Aiken. Previous winners of the prize have included Richard Wilbur, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maxine Kumin and Wendell Berry.

Garrett has published seven volumes of poetry including most recently, Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments: New and Old Poems 1957-1997, published by Louisiana State University Press. His Collected Poems was published in 1984.