Ralph Salisbury

Ralph Salisbury (January 24, 1926 - October 9, 2017) was an American poet of Cherokee, Shawnee, Irish and English heritage. His poem "In the Children's Museum in Nashville" was published in The New Yorker in 1960, making him one of the first Native American poets to receive national attention. His autobiography So Far So Good won the 2012 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His book Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

Early Life

Ralph Salisbury was born in 1926 on a farm in Fayette County in northeast Iowa to a Cherokee, Shawnee, English father and an Irish American mother, who raised him on a farm with no electricity or running water. He survived a lightning strike at the age of 15. A year after graduating from Aurora (Iowa) High School at age 16, he enlisted in the Air Force and was trained as an aerial gunman, completing his training within days of the end of World War Two. The G.I Bill enabled him to enroll in the North Iowa Teachers College and, later, the University of Iowa, where he studied with Robert Lowell and earned a MFA degree.

Awards

• C.E.S. Wood Retrospective Award (2015)
• River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Book Prize (2012)
• Rockefeller Bellagio Award in fiction (1992)
• Northwest Review Poetry Award
• Chapelbrook Award