Peterkin Winner Announcement
The winner of the 2008 Julia Mood Peterkin award is Suzanne Cleary of Peekskill, New York.

Converse College is pleased to announce that Suzanne Cleary has received the 2008 Julia Peterkin Award in Poetry. Cleary will receive the award of $1,000, plus she will receive travel expenses to give a reading from her award-winning poetry at Converse College.

Suzanne Cleary’s poetry books are Trick Pear (2007) and Keeping Time (2002), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her collection Blue Cloth was chosen by Marilyn Nelson and Robert Cording as winner of the 2004 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival chapbook competition. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY Rockland and also teaches at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is a regular contributor for Bloomsbury Review.

Established in 1998 by the Department of English and Creative Writing at Converse College, the Julia Peterkin Award is a national contest honoring the finest young poets and writers in America. The award is named for Converse graduate Julia Mood Peterkin who won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary.