Suzanne Cleary

Bio

Suzanne Cleary was born and raised in Binghamton, New York. Her poetry books are Keeping Time (2002), Trick Pear (2007), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. A book reviewer for Bloomsbury Review and Professor of English at SUNY Rockland, she has an MA in Writing from Washington University and a Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the Frost Place Poetry Festival and the Frost Place Advanced Poetry Seminar, Manhattanville College, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and read at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Best American Poetry; Pushcart Press XXIX: Best of the Small Presses; Poetry 180; Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review; Poems from the Fishhouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Her poetry has been featured on Garrison Keilor’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” and published in journals including Atlantic Monthly, Poetry London, Georgia Review, and Ploughshares. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Julia Peterkin Award, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. Billy Collins writes of Keeping Time, “I have long been anticipating this first book and the chance to express how highly I value Suzanne Cleary’s poetry. Her poems have a vigorous forward roll to them and are strung together by daring chains of association.” Mark Jarman writes of Trick Pear, “Cleary’s is a genuine lyric gift as rich as it is rare.”