Sue Ellen Thompson
2010 Maryland Author Award Winner

Sue Ellen Thompson is a graduate of Middlebury College, Vermont (B.A.) and The Bread Loaf School of English (M.A.). Her first book of poems, This Body of Silk, was awarded the 1986 Samuel French Morse Prize (judge: X. J. Kennedy) and was published by Northeastern University Press. A second volume, The Wedding Boat, was published in 1995 by Owl Creek Press in Seattle. A third volume, The Leaving: New and Selected Poems, was published by Autumn House Press and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. A fourth volume, The Golden Hour, appeared in June 2006 and was also nominated for a Pulitzer. Her work has been included in the Best American Poetry series, read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, and featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated newspaper column. She recently edited The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.

Ms. Thompson was the 1982 National Arts Club Scholar in Poetry and the 1987 Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. She has given readings at the National Arts Club in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Library of Congress as well as at the Aran Islands Poetry Festival in Galway, Ireland. Ms. Thompson spent the summer of 1998 as resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and has taught at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, Binghamton University, and Central Connecticut State University. She currently lives in Oxford, MD and teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda.