Connections Literary Series: Poet Sean Thomas Dougherty
April 01, 2024
07:30 PM - 08:30 PM
Prince Frederick Campus (Building B), Room 103/104/105
Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn, New York; Toledo, Ohio; and Manchester, New Hampshire. He received his B.A. at the University of New Hampshire and his MFA at Syracuse University. He comes from a diverse family with an African American stepfather and a mother of mixed Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
He is the author or editor of 20 books including the Publishers Weekly Top 10 New Releases in Poetry, “Death Prefers the Minor Keys” (BOA Editions).
His book, “The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things,” received the 2021 Jacar Press Full Length Poetry Prize selected by Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs. Dougherty’s book, “Not All Saints,” won the 2020 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize. His book, “The Second O of Sorrow” (BOA Editions 2018), received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University.
Dougherty’s numerous awards also include The James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, an Established Artist Fellowship for Northwest Pennsylvania, two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and a United States Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans.
Dougherty’s work as an editor includes the anthology, “Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poems on Autism,” published by NYQ Books. This anthology was the first literary anthology to engage the complicated disability of autism.
Dougherty currently works as a writing mentor with the MFA program in creative writing at Western Connecticut State University and as a medical technician and long-term caregiver for people with traumatic brain injuries. He was the seventh official poet laureate of Erie County, Pennsylvania.