Rodney Jones won the Kingsley Tufts Prize for Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985-2005. His eight other books include Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Transparent Gestures, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Honors include the Hanes Prize, the Harper Lee Award and the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jones is a professor and distinguished scholar at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.