For over twenty years Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more populist traditions that extend back to Walt Whitman. His subject matter ranges from basketball to Bjork, from blue collar workers to Biggie Smalls, from Luciano Pavarotti to women waiting at a diner outside a prison in Upstate New York. Selecting from the best of eight previous collections, this New and Selected reveals the powerful arc and development of Dougherty's writing and establishes him as a voice of dissent for the future. A former Fulbright fellow, Sean Thomas Dougherty works at Gold Crown Billiards in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Author
In addition to Scything Grace (Etruscan Press, 2013), Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of thirteen books across genres, including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994 – 2014 (BOA Editions, 2014) Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA Editions, 2010), which was a finalist for Binghamton University Milton Kessler’s literary prize for the best book by a poet over 40, the prose-poem-novel The Blue City (2008 Marick Press/Wayne State University), and Broken Hallelujahs (BOA Editions, 2007). He is the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. His work has been read on PBS radio in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and Cleveland. Known for his electrifying performances he has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals across North America and Europe including the Lollapalooza Music Festival, the Detroit Art Festival, the South Carolina Literary Festival, the Old Dominion University Literary Festival, Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Maine, Sarah Lawrence College, SUNY Binghamton, the University of California Santa Cruz, the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, the Erie Jazz Festival, the London (UK) Poetry Cafe and the BardFest Series in Budapest Hungary, and across Albania and Macedonia where he was translated and published and appeared on national television, sponsored by the US State Department. He currently lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, with his family, where he works in a pool hall and writes his poems.
