Jim Tilley

Jim Tilley, Canadian-born and a physicist by education, is an American poet who previously worked at senior management levels in the insurance and investment banking businesses.

Education and Employment

Jim Tilley was born in Montreal, Canada in 1950. He graduated from St. Johns High School in St. Jean, Quebec in 1967 and from McGill University in 1971 with a First-Class Honors degree in Physics, winning the Anne Molson Gold Medal for Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1975 and then joined Sun Life of Canada at its U.S. headquarters in Wellesley, Massachusetts, qualifying as a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in 1977. He worked at the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in Boston from 1978 to 1981 when he moved to New York in the Group Pensions Department of Equitable Life Assurance.

In 1983, Dr. Tilley joined the Wall Street firm, Morgan Stanley, where he remained until his retirement in 2001. While at Morgan Stanley, he headed Worldwide Fixed Income Research and ended his career as Institutional Securities’ Chief Information Officer.

During his careers in the insurance industry and on Wall Street, Jim Tilley wrote many pioneering research papers and was twice awarded the Society of Actuaries’ Annual Prize and also the Triennial Prize.. His papers have also won awards from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance and the Casualty Actuarial Society. In 2008, he was named to receive the International Insurance Institute’s Founders’ Award for his seminal work in the field of asset-liability management.

Dr. Tilley has served on the Board of the Society of Actuaries, as Chair of The Actuarial Foundation, on the Board of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and as Chair of its Investment Committee. He was also Chair of the International Actuarial Association’s finance and investments section (AFIR) and was a keynote speaker on the application of modern techniques in investments and finance to the management of insurance and pension funds at the 1988 International Congress of Actuaries in Helsinki.

Poetry

Since his retirement from Morgan Stanley in 2001, Jim Tilley has been writing poetry. More than 40 of his poems have been published in various literary journals and magazines, among which are Southwest Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sycamore Review, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Florida Review and New Delta Review. He has won the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry , the New England Poetry Club’s Firman Houghton Award , and the Editors’ Choice Award from Rhino. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work also appears in the college textbook anthology “Literature to Go” (Bedford/St. Martin’s), edited by Michael Meyer. His first book of poetry, “In Confidence,” was published in January 2011 by Red Hen Press. His poems range from lyric to narrative, and while he generally writes in free verse, about half the poems in the book are in the form of sonnets.

A sample of Jim Tilley’s poems can be found on his website, http://jimtilley.net. Typical of his craft is the poem, “Half-Finished Bridge.”

Half-Finished Bridge

No important work to do today, I think, as I lie in the hammock one last time before storing it for winter, just a few chores around the yard— deck chairs to be stacked and stashed away and the lawn raked despite the pears and oaks hanging on to their green.

Stamped on the pencil I’m using, first snow falling on the half-finished bridge, now as in Bashō’s time, the halfway done possibly a road to nowhere, like the wars we shouldn’t start and the marriages we can’t finish. But he must’ve meant that I find myself

amidst the season’s first flurries, leaves collecting at my feet as I rock in the wind, writing to my father that I’m grateful he’s still alive and there’s time to erect the rest of the trestle and walk together to the other side, light snow falling on our backs.

Of Jim Tilley’s book, “In Confidence,” Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, writes:

Jim Tilley does confide in his readers here as he explores a refreshing variety of subjects—everything from the complexity of father-son and husband-wife relations to the more solvable problems of dark matter and the origins of the cosmos. But what wins our confidence is not his range but his steady hand on the poem and his steady gaze at the world.

and Stephen Dobyns, a nationally prominent poet, one of whose books was a Lamont Poetry Selection, says:

At first glance Jim Tilley’s In Confidence seems to consist of calm, graceful poems of upper middle class domesticity, but turkey vultures wait in the yard and many stories have unhappy endings. Instead the poems are about trying to maintain “this fragile equilibrium” like a tightrope walker tip-toeing above a lion’s den. One sees the quiet elegance is all that keeps one from shouting, “Watch out!” These are finely crafted poems in which readers will find bits and pieces of their own lives.

External Links

He is featured in a newspaper article, “Poetry offers new directions for Jim Tilley,” in the Bedford Pound Ridge Record Review:

http://www.record-review.com/record-review/RRLEAD021111.html

He is also featured in an article, “The Poet of Wall Street,” in Westchester Magazine:

http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/March-2011/The-Poet-of-Wall-Street/

and also in an interview, “In Confidence: An Interview with Poet Jim Tilley,” by Charles Coté, a fellow poet:

http://charlescote.blogspot.com/2011/03/in-confidence-interview-with-poet-jim.html