Idris Anderson is winner of the 2008 May Swenson Poetry Award. Anderson earned her Ph.D in English Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has received a number of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including summer seminars at Harvard and in London. She held an NEH Teacher-Scholar grant for a year of research at Stanford University. She has published on contemporary American poets, Greek tragedy, and Virginia Woolf.