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Sean Thomas Dougherty

Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in New York City in 1965. He grew up in an inter-racial family, with a mother of mixed European descent, and an African--American stepdad. He is a former factory worker and high school dropout become a rennowned US performance-poet . He is the author of 6 books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca (2004 Mammoth Books). His work appears in numerous anthologies and textbooks including Short Fuse: An Anthology of Global Fusion Poets (2002 Rattalpallax), American Diaspora: Poets on Exile (2001 U Iowa Press) American Poetry: Next Generation (2000 Carnegie Mellon U Press) Identity Lessons (1999 Viking Penguin) and Poetry Nation (1999 Vehicule, Canada). He has performed at over 100 festivals, universities and performance venues across North America and Europe. His awards include a 2003 Pennsylvania Individual Artist Literature Award, a 2002 Penn State Junior Faculty Research Award, the 2002 Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Prize from Bitter Oleander Magazine, a 2002 Allen Ginsberg Award (3rd prize), the Delmore Schwartz Poetry Prize from Syracuse University, the U Mass Lowell Poetry Prize, the Syracuse Symposium Poetry Prize, grants from the Syracuse NY Arts Council and the Just Buffalo Literary Center, and eight Pushcart Prize Nominations. He has taught at Syracuse University where he received his MFA and did doctoral work in rhetoric, and currently teaches at Penn State Erie where he is Assistant Director of Creative Writing.

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