Rodney Jones (left), a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, is the author of eight collections of poetry. “Salvation Blues” includes poems from six of his earlier books, as well as 24 new pieces.  For more than 25 years, his poems have appeared in the nation’s most distinguished literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.  His poems have been selected six times for inclusion in the annual volume, “The Best American Poetry,” and his work has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including “The Morrow Anthology of Younger Poets, Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology,” and “Western Wind.”

Since his first book of poems, “The Story They Told Us of Light,” was selected by poet Elizabeth Bishop for the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Prize in 1980, Jones’ work has garnered many significant honors.  His awards include a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (for "Transparent Gestures," Mariner Books, 1989), the Jean Stein Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, The Kenyon Review Poetry Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.  He also was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Born in northern Alabama, Rodney Jones is a graduate of the University of Alabama. He has been called “the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American Poetry” (Southern Review), and fellow southern writer James Dickey lauded Jones’ work for its exploration of the tension between history and modernity, where “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”

Christopher Bothe, a member of the Class of 1972, was a poet, award-winning journalist, and printer who died in 1984. Bothe’s family and friends developed the lecture in his memory in 1987.