Ron Padgett's books include New & Selected Poems; Great Balls of Fire; The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets; Blood Work: Selected Prose; and, most recently, You Never Know (poems) and Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (a memoir). He is the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire's Poet Assassinated and Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems. In addition to grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2001 Padgett was made an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. In the fall of 2004 Coffee House Press will issue his Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com. (source: Words Without Borders)