Susan L. Leary

Susan L. Leary is the author of seven poetry collections: SENTENCE (Nine Syllables Press, December 2026), selected by Eugenia Leigh as the winner of the Nine Syllables Press Chapbook Contest; More Flowers (Trio House Press, February 2026); Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press; and most recently Brink Was the Word I Was Looking For (Diode Poetry Journal, 2026), co-authored with Jarrett Moseley. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, North American Review, Third Coast, Cream City Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Smartish Pace, The Arkansas International, Sequestrum, Crab Creek Review, Harpur Palate, South Dakota Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she taught Writing Studies for 15 years, and she has also taught at Nova Southeastern University and Indiana University. Currently, she splits her time between Venice, FL and Indianapolis, IN.

SENTENCE

SENTENCE was chosen as the winner of the 2025 Nine Syllables Press chapbook contest by Eugenia Leigh, and combines the blistering scrutiny of documentary poetics with the tenacious love of a sister. Leary’s brother wrote journal entries during the 90 days he spent in county jail for addiction-related offenses, with the intention of creating a book together. Left with the gift and the challenge of this archive, Leary explores the merging of self and the surreal claustrophobia of incarceration, asking what it means to be virtuous amidst injustice in America and what it means to fiercely love those beyond our reach. In her judge’s citation, Leigh writes, “Susan L. Leary’s SENTENCE is a moving, clear-eyed collection balancing profound emotional restraint with marked tenderness as unwavering familial love radiates from the book’s precise seams … The taut, rigorous poems … capture both the held breath and the sharp, everlasting exhale of grief.” 

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More Flowers

With lyrical acuity, philosophical insight, and deep reverence for girlhood, womanhood, and the wildly intelligent spirit that is the female imagination, Susan L. Leary’s newest collection, More Flowers, unfolds as self-interrogation, tribute, and template for survival. At its center is the figure of the mother, whose fierce brutality in navigating the world offers the speaker ambition, tender affirmation, and a necessary understanding of her origins. In particular, images of nature abound: at each turn, animals, weather patterns, changing landscapes, and the strength and fragility of flowers mirror life’s emotional complications and teach the will to outlast. Most of all, these poems celebrate the idea of excess, that sensation of always wanting more—more time, more meaning, more love, more flowers—because despite every trial and every sadness, this life, quite simply, is never enough.

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Dressing the Bear

Selected by Kimberly Blaeser as the winner of the 2023 Louise Bogan Award with Trio House Press, Dressing the Bear is a collection of poems that “enact the power of capturing grief, transience, and spiritual searching on the page” (Publishers Weekly). 

Composed in the wake of her brother’s passing, these poems explore the themes of love, loss, grief, longing, and addiction. Many come in the form of a direct address to her brother: how to speak to the dead now? How to convince herself of her brother’s continuation in the next life? Of equal concern is the matter of love: what kind of love exists between a brother and a sister, between the addict and those who love him? More than anything, however, these poems seek to unravel her brother’s wounds, to understand his pride and shame as a result of addiction, as well as to honor and illuminate his unique wisdom-his charm, his humor, and his creativity-that on even his most difficult days was always there.

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