A Dress Rehearsal for the Truth

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Alan Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. Shapiro has published 14 books of poetry, including Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Night of the Republic, finalist for the National Book Award and The Griffin Prize; Old War, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Happy Hour, which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Mixed Company, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry; The Dead Alive and Busy, winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University; Song and Dance, and Tantalus in Love, both of which won the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society. Shapiro is the author of a novel, Broadway Baby, and three books of prose: In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination; The Last Happy Occasion, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997; and Vigil, a memoir about his sister’s death from breast cancer, and winner of the New England Bookseller’s Discovery Designation.