Background

Connolly, Geraldine was born on October 12, 1947, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, United States. She's the daughter of Gerald William and Rosalia (Skavinski) Raling.

Education

Geraldine Connolly graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in 1968 and from the University of Maryland with a Master of Arts in English in 1975.

Career

Geraldine Connolly has worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971-1975, has taught workshops for the Writer’s Center in Bethesda since 1977, taught classes in the Maryland Poetry-in-the-Schools Program at Maryland State Arts Council since 1980, the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua New York, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Program in Washington.

She was also executive editor of Poet Lore magazine in Bethesda from 1994 to 2000.

Connolly is author of a chapbook, The Red Room published in 1988 (There she describes looking at an old photograph album with her sister, an album filled with pictures of her father and the woman who was his lover before her mother. Lydia was the woman he met in England during the war.), and four full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (a variety of remembrances, including her exile to boarding school and the pain of being worked over in a beauty shop) appeared in 1990, Province of Fire (an account of the journey to maturity, the struggle to break away from the twin restrictions of a Catholic childhood and the mother's molding hand) published in December 1998, Hand of the Wind in 2009, and her new book, Aileron, published in 2018.

Connolly has received several awards, grants, and fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in 1987 and 1995, the Carolyn Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Maryland Arts Council Grant (1988) and Fellowship (1990), the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (1991), the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize (2002), and the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition Prize.

Geraldine's work has appeared in many magazines and journals including Poetry, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, in the anthology Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (1999), Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry and has been broadcast on WPFW, Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, as well as Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection.

Achievements

• Geraldine Connolly has been listed as a noteworthy Poet, Educator by Marquis Who's Who.
  
  Geraldine has won many prizes for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in 1987 and 1995, the Carolyn Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Maryland Arts Council Grant (1988) and Fellowship (1990), the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (1991), W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize (2002), 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, Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, American Life in Poetry, Shenandoah, and Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection. WPFW’s Writers Almanac broadcasted her poem, “The Summer I was Sixteen.”

Works

More photos

• book

  • Aileron

    ("Open this book at random and find a trove of thrilling i...)

    2018
  • Hand of the Wind

    (Hand of the Wind by Geraldine Connolly is a book of poetr...)

    2009
  • The Red Room 1988
  • Food for the Winter 1990
  • Province of Fire 1998

Membership

• 

  Poetry Society of America , United States

• 

  Maryland State Arts Council , United States

Personality

Geraldine Connolly loves being outdoors and spent much of her childhood roaming the hills and woods of western Pennsylvania. She still spends as much time as she can outside. In her own words, she has a visual mind and imagination, and she would have like to have been a painter.

Interests

• Writers

  Charles Simic, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Stearns Eliot

Connections

Geraldine Connolly married Stephen James Connolly on July 26, 1969. She has two children: Sarah and Brian.

Father:

Gerald William Raling

Mother:

Rosalia (Skavinski) Raling

Daughter:

Sarah Connolly

Son:

Brian Connolly

husband:

Stephen James Connolly

References

• Geraldine Connolly's Facebook
• Geraldine Connolly's Homepage