May 17, 2026: Suzanne Cleary

These poems offer a poignant tenderness in encounters with art, literature, history, and memory, small moments of transformation, “like a tear in fabric, through which light passes.” This is a poet who reminds us, “Attention is love,” and I love these poems — Ellen Bass, author of INDIGO

Suzanne Cleary’s The Odds speaks of the tender moments of unknowing in all of us. In sure-footed lines, these poems cover great distance: from the foibles we all experience to our dreams of bigger worlds. This moving collection creates breath, and room to travel between worlds as we speak to the dead as well as the living. — Jan Beatty, author of DRAGSTRIPPING

Suzanne Cleary’s latest book The Odds was chosen by poet Jan Beatty as winner of the 2024 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. The book was 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 two Pushcart Prizes and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and residencies at Yaddo and  MacDowell. 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 University, 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. Read more about Suzanne on her web site: suzanneclearypoet.com.

Suzanne will read for the Katonah Poetry series at 4pm on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at the Katonah Village Library at 26 Bedford Road, Katonah, NY 10536