In Mozart's Pigtail, Townley offers an evocative series of poem-portraits of musicians, writers, and intimate friends. Townley honors these meaningful connections in his life, and readers experience how these subjects can ignite a poet's creative power.

Mozart’s Pigtail is Roderick Townley’s third full collection of poetry. He has published books in several other genres and received a number of honors, among them the Governor’s Arts Award, the Peregrine Prize for Short Fiction, a Master Artist Fellowship in Fiction, the Thorpe Menn Award, three Kansas Notable Book awards, and two prizes from the Academy of American Poets. His children’s novels have appeared in several foreign editions, as well as in large print, audio, and book-club versions. One of them, The Blue Shoe (Knopf), was illustrated by Harry Potter artist Mary GrandPré. Another, The Great Good Thing (Atheneum), has been optioned for film and made into an opera. After earning his PhD at Rutgers, Roderick taught in Chile on a Fulbright Fellowship and worked in New York as a journalist and editor before moving to Kansas with his wife, Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita Wyatt Townley.