A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Cyrus Cassells has won the National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume The Gospel according to Wild Indigo was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the 2018 Balcones Prize for Outstanding Book of the Year. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His seventh book, More Than Watchmen at Daybreak, a lyric cycle about his stay in a Benedictine desert monastery in northern New Mexico, was published by Nine Mile Books in 2020. His eighth and ninth books, The World That the Shooter Left Us and Is There Room for Another Horse on your Horse Ranch? (a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series), will be published by Four Way Books in March 2022 and in February 2024. In 2019 he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his cultural criticism in The Washington Spectator. His first novel, My Gingerbread Shakespeare, and a second book of Catalan translations, To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, are forthcoming. He is a tenured full professor of English at Texas State University and divides his time between Austin and Hawaii, where he is at work on a historical novel, The Going of the Inland Soul to Sea, inspired by the legacy of Saint Damien of Molokai.
The World That the Shooter Left Us
