Sherod Santos

Poet and essayist Sherod Santos was born on September 9, 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina.

He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the Naitonal Book Award; The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2010); The Perishing (2003); The Pilot Star Elegies (1999), which won a Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize and was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five nominees for The New Yorker Book Award; The City of Women (1993); The Southern Reaches (1989); and Accidental Weather (1982), which was selected for the National Poetry Series.

In 2000, the University of Georgia Press published A Poetry of Two Minds, a collection of his essays.

His awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and the essay, and the 1984 appointment as Robert Frost Poet at the Frost house in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has also received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

From 1990 to 1997, Santos served as external examiner and poet-in-residence at the Poets' House in Portmuck, Northern Ireland, and in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.