Geraldine connolly biography

Poet Geraldine Connolly was.
Poet Geraldine Connolly grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and her childhood and remembrances of her Polish Catholic girlhood are evident in her work.
Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

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Interview with Geraldine Connolly — August 9, 2010

Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1947. Her chapbook, The Red Room, was published in 1988, and a full length collection, Food for the Winter (Purdue University Press), appeared in 1990. Her second book of poetry, Province of Fire, was published by Iris Press in December of 1998, and Hand of the Wind appeared in June 2009. She has won many prizes for her work, including two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, the Carolyn Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship to Breadloaf, and the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition Prize. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including Poetry, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Shenandoah. WPFW’s Writers Almanac broadcast her poem, “The Summer I was Sixteen.”

Christopher Nelson: Often landscape, a natural setting, is the stage for your poems, the atmosphere in which insight is found—a motif foreshadow

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Geraldine Connolly

The Best Poem Of Geraldine Connolly

The Summer I Was Sixteen

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.

Geraldine Connolly Comments

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Poetry & Conversation: Geraldine Connolly & Doritt Carroll

Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of a chapbook, The Red Room, and four full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press), Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), and her new book, Aileron, published by Terrapin Books in 2018.

Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Cortland Review, and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students; Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework; and The Doll Collection. She has won many awards, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" project and has been broadcast on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, as well as Grace Cavalieri's The Poet and the Poem.