Fanny Howe, 68, has been awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000, given to a "living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition."

In announcing the Lilly Prize, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, said: “Fanny Howe is a religious writer whose work makes you more alert and alive to the earth, an experimental writer who can break your heart. Live in her world for a while, and it can change the way you think of yours.”

The Poetry Foundation issued the following statement in making the award: “Reading Fanny Howe—both the poetry and the prose—one has the sense of a life that has been inhabited so intensely and lovingly that even her smallest fragments seem steeped in that experience. Her poetry can be elusive and hermetic, and then abruptly and devastatingly candid; it is marked by the pressures of history and culture, yet defiantly, transcendently lyrical. She is a demanding and deeply rewarding artist, and her body of work seems larger, stranger, and more permanent with each new book she publishes.”

Howe’s poetry collections include Gone (University of California Press, 2003), Selected Poems (UC Press, 2000), On the Ground (Graywolf Press, 2004), and The Lyrics (Graywolf, 2007). She has also written 5 novels and two collections of essays.