Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011)

Eleanor Ross Taylor was born in 1920. She graduated from Women's College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1942. While studying at Vanderbilt University, she was introduced to novelist Peter Taylor whom she married in 1943. Since Eleanor's first publication, Wilderness of toon meer Ladies in 1960, she published five collections of poetry: Welcome Eumenides (1972), New and Selected Poems (1983), Days Going/Days Coming Back (1991), Late Leisure (1999), and Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems (2009), which have earned her critical acclaim and several awards. Among these awards are the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize (1997-1998), a fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the Library of Virginia's Literary Award for Poetry (2000), the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry (2001) and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition (2010). Eleanor Ross Taylor was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2009 and the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2010. She died December 30, 2011 in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder