He is an assistant professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University. His honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books, 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and Poetry Society of Virginia North American Book Award and finalist for the NAACP Image Award and PEN/Voelcker Award.

Eliot's Four Quartets in a single volume, in America, in 1943-is first and foremost a celebration of the multi-part poem, and is awarded to a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2020. The Four Quartets Prize-which was launched in 2018 on the 75th anniversary of the publication of T. Murillo will receive an award of $21,000 and each finalist will receive an award of $1,000. The judges also named Don Mee Choi for her book DMZ Colony and Srikanth Reddy for his book Underworld Lit, both published by Wave Books in 2020. Mr. He was selected by judges Carolyn Forché, Donika Kelly, and Arthur Sze. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America are pleased to announce that John Murillo is the winner of the 2021 Four Quartets Prize for his poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” from his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020).

The 4 quartets