The Literary Arts organization in Portland has recognized Ralph Salisbury — a poet, writer and professor emeritus at the University of Oregon — with the C.E.S. Wood Retrospective Award.

Salisbury will accept the honor at the 2015 Oregon Book Awards & Fellowships, held at Portland’s Gerding Theater at the Armory on April 13.

The C.E.S. Wood Retrospective Award celebrates a renowned career in Oregon letters. Salisbury has published 11 books of poetry, three short-story collections and a prize-winning memoir titled “So Far, So Good.”

Salisbury’s work spans a wide variety of subjects, influenced by his personal experience as a Cherokee-Shawnee-English-Irish-American man. A veteran of World War II and a child of the Great Depression, Salisbury has also written about the effects of a constant state of warfare and poverty.

“Though I have lived and worked among the intelligentsia of many nations, my writing comes from having lived as a questing, mixed-race, working-class individual in a violent world,” Salisbury says on his website.

His previous awards and honors include three Fulbright professorships to Norway and Germany, an Amparts lectureship in India, the Rockefeller Bellagio Award in Fiction — along with a residency at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy — the Northwest Poetry Award and the Chapelbrook Award.

Salisbury has taught in the UO Department of English since 1960.

— By Nathaniel Brown, Public Affairs Communications