The associate professor of English got the word in early June that she’d joined highly select company. MacArthur Fellow awards—bestowed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and popularly dubbed the "genius grants"—carry a no-strings-attached stipend of $500,000 over five years. Perillo was one of 25 fellows chosen this year for "exceptional creativity, record of significant accomplishment, and potential for still greater achievement."

Although Perillo also writes creative nonfiction and short stories, her poetry was what won her this honor. She has published three compilations: Dangerous Life (1989), The Body Mutinies (1996), and The Oldest Map with the Name America: New and Selected Poems (1999).

Perillo writes vivid, metaphor-rich free verse sometimes structured in stanzas. Her references range from rock climbing to laundromats, the moon landing to survivalist catalogs, and Ingmar Bergman to The Big Bopper. Her poems are at once lyrical and conversational, controlled and emotional. They often demand close reading, but those willing to take the time are amply rewarded.

The MacArthur Foundation describes Perillo’s work as "marked by an urban speed and a narrative style driven by characterization and drama." Poet Andrew Hudgins put it more graphically. Quoting from a work of Perillo’s called "Needles," about a friend’s illness, he wrote that her poems "race flat out....And when the poems veer almost out of control, she knows how to steer ‘into the fishtails’ and...that ‘when everything goes to hell the worst you can do / is hit the brakes.’"

"I've always had a lot of beginner's luck," says Perillo of her writing. The first poem she published won a prize, and Dangerous Life won publication as the top manuscript in Northeastern University’s Morse Poetry Prize competition. It went on to win the Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Perillo’s work has garnered several other national honors, including a PEN/Revson Foundation grant, Purdue University's Emery Poetry Prize, and Claremont College’s Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, and many other periodicals.

Perillo didn't set out to be a writer. She got her bachelor's degree from McGill University in wildlife management and eventually worked as a park ranger at Mount Rainier National Park and as a naturalist at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. But during a period of unemployment following her graduation from McGill, she began writing poems.

"I'd had a friend in college who was a writer, who'd stay up all night to write," she says. "It seemed very glamorous."

While she was working in San Francisco, Perillo started taking poetry classes. Before long, she left for Syracuse University, where she earned a master’s degree in creative writing. She taught for a few years at Saint Martin’s College in Olympia, Washington, then came to SIUC in 1991. Driving her career change was the fact that she developed multiple sclerosis in the mid-1980s, which made working outdoors increasingly difficult.

Perillo's poems cover a wide territory. Dangerous Life explores the theme of aggression and violence, both personal and political—in particular, violence against women. The Body Mutinies deals with the notion of illness and of the body’s frailty and resilience; its title poem concerns the doctor’s visit when Perillo’s own condition was diagnosed. The Oldest Map with the Name America contains her longest poems, narratives that use excursions into art, music, pop culture, physics, history, and mythology to illuminate the human condition. Not surprisingly, nature also figures prominently in her work.

Candor about her own experiences and limitations has been a hallmark of Perillo’s writing, although she tempered it in her latest book. "I fictionalize in equal amounts as I report autobiographical information," she says, "but it's hard to convince other people about that, especially family members. Now I'm much more measured, at least as far as other people are concerned.  About myself, I don't care. I'll say anything about myself." If you confide in your readers, Perillo believes, you win their trust.

Because The Body Mutinies is her most personal work, she reworked it many times. "You worry about whether your intimacy is going to be overwhelming to the reader," she says. Although she was ultimately satisfied with the book, it took her three years to find a publisher. Some readers felt it was inappropriate for her to mention her illness. Nonetheless, she says, "That's something I decided I wasn't going to worry about. I kept my physical situation out of the next book, but I don't think it's good to constrain oneself by putting certain subject matter out-of-bounds."

During her entire tenure at SIUC, Perillo has had a commuter marriage. Her husband, James Rudy, works and lives in Olympia, where she has spent her summers. But being in Carbondale was good for her career, she says. "I got a lot done. It was like going to a writer's colony." Here she wrote and taught with few distractions. She also benefited from having as one of her colleagues fellow poet Rodney Jones. That was "very important to me," she says. "I learned a lot from his work."

The MacArthur grant will allow Perillo to take an extended leave from the University to concentrate on her writing and her health. The award has brought her a measure of celebrity and a heap of press clippings. The down side? "It's a bit daunting to have this ‘genius’ label," she admits. "I still have to sit down and write the next poem, and it's like a dark cloud hanging over my head: Will they find out I'm a fraud?"

Winning the award has been similar in some ways to winning the lottery. Perillo says, "I've been getting e-mails and letters from perfect strangers" with advice about what she should do with the windfall. A few have been downright mercenary. One letter came from a prisoner doing 25-to-life "who felt we'd be a perfect match," says Perillo. She also was contacted by someone who wanted funding for a dubious invention. "People are more interested in money, certainly, than in poetry," she says with a rueful laugh.

Despite her successes, poetry remains a tough business. Of her early writing, she says, "I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a lot of drive behind those poems. When you’re a young writer you go on instincts and have a lot of energy. Now I tend to conceptualize before I write. It's a more structured approach and I have things that I know beforehand I want the poem to say. But I’d like to recapture some of that early energy."

Poetry, she says, "still seems glamorous, when it's working properly—but it's usually not working. It gets harder as you go along because your standards and aspirations are much higher. It gets more laborious and takes a lot longer. What I want to accomplish now is more ambitious."

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