"Elegant, discursive, and tough"
--Judith Vollmer, on Cleary's Beauty Mark
Women's Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 1. January/February 2016
| Suzanne Cleary | |
Suzanne Cleary's latest manuscript, The Odds, was chosen by poet Jan Beatty as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. The book will be published in March 2025 by New York Quarterly Books.
Cleary's Crude Angel, her fourth full-length poetry collection, was published in November 2018 by BkMk Press (U of Missouri-Kansas City). Beauty Mark (BkMk 2013) won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and also received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize and the Patterson Award for Literary Excellence. Keeping Time (2002) and Trick Pear (2007) were published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Poets Marilyn Nelson and Robert Cording selected her collection Blue Cloth as winner of the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition.
Cleary's national awards include a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her poems have appeared in journals including Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry London.
As a core faculty in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Converse College, Cleary has a BA in History from SUNY Oneonta, an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Although a New York City area resident for over thirty years, Suzanne was born and raised upstate, in Binghamton, New York.
Suzanne Cleary shares the name of a well-known Irish dancer. The poet is not much of a dancer, but she is an avid amateur painter.