Eleanor Ross Taylor has won the 2010 William Carlos Williams Book Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of America for her latest book, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960-2008.
This is the citation given by Brett Fletcher Lauer, managing director of the Poetry Society of America:
"Composed over a period of forty-eight years, Captive Voices, is a collage of historical narrative, meditation, dramatic monologue, and autobiography. Eleanor Ross Taylor writes about the lives of American women the way William Carlos Williams wrote about Paterson. This book is extraordinary, difficult, and ravishing. It is a complex and unexpected convergence of the influences of modernism and a wholly original, native genius. Reading it one suddenly realizes that one is in the presence of an American classic."
