Who said there's no money in it?

Illinois resident Rodney Jones was named winner of the 2007 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his collection Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin). The Tufts Award is given annually to a mid-career poet and comes with a $100,000 prize, one of the largest monetary awards available to U.S. poets.

Jones, who is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, is an Alabama native who was also a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Houghton Mifflin). The author of six other books, Jones has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors.

We love our Carbondale neighbors and colleagues. Congratulations, Professor Jones.