Heiress gives $100 million to Chicago poetry journal
CHICAGO -- The influential literary magazine Poetry has rejected Ruth Lilly's verse for decades, but it's not about to snub her latest offering -- a multimillion-dollar gift. The ailing, 87-year-old billionaire heiress to the Eli Lilly and Co. pharmaceutical fortune will give the publication, which ran the first major works of Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, millions of dollars a year under a new estate plan. "Ruth Lilly has ensured our existence into perpetuity," Poetry editor Joe Parisi said in announcing the gift Friday at a dinner at the Arts Club of Chicago.