Ralph Salisbury's awards includes a Rockefeller Bellagio Award; a Northwest Review Poetry Award, and a Chapelbrook Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Yellow Medicine Review, The New Yorker and other journals. IN choosing him as a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, judge Maxine Kumin, wrote, "This is a poet dedicated to keeping his heritage alive. His book deserves a broad audience.

Books by Ralph Salisbury:

Other poems on the web by Ralph Salisbury:
Five poems
"Vines Black Upon Black Leaves"

Ralph Salisbury's Website.

About Light From a Bullet Hole:

"Although Ralph Salisbury may refer to himself as 'A Killer Seeking Forgiveness,' this collection of his new and selected work shows him to be one of the most thoughtful and moral writers of his generation. Without ever sacrificing literary excellence for self-righteousness or eloquence for polemic, Salisbury's memorable poetry reflects not only his long full life and the Cherokee culture that has helped shape his vision, it is also a corrective lens nation."
—Joseph Bruchac

"Now in his eighty-third year to heaven, Ralph Salisbury has gifted us with a volume of new and selected poems in which there is no diminution of powers but an amazing further blosoming. . . The poems of this volume make stunningly clear the ways in which Ralph Salisbury continues to model the traditional and modern (postmodern, if you will) roles of the poet as Cherokee humanist and indigenous cosmopolitan."
—Arnold Krupat