Mary Louise Kiernan is the grateful recipient of two literary honors: the Walt Whitman Award for Excellence in Creative Writing from Queensborough Community College and a 2015 Poetry Prize from Tempe Public Library and Arizona State University. Her first laurel baffled, the second emboldened.
She holds her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications in Written Media from SUNY Empire State College, where she studied poetry under Mary Makofske. Mary Louise Kiernan’s poems have been published in The Delmarva Review, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, Pudding Magazine, Inscape, Hudson Valley Echoes, Chronogram, ArtSpace, Tempe Writers Forum, Common Ground Review, Broad River Review, and the Metropolitan Diary in The New York Times.
A former reporter, copywriter, proofreader, and associate editor, her essays have been published in Catskill Country Magazine, The Times Herald-Record, and in the Long Island Sunday section of The New York Times. Indeed, one (multiply rejected) first-person essay on glossophobia planted the seed for her poem “The Waltz of the Flowers.”
Poetry writing workshops have been at the core of Mary Louise Kiernan’s education. Some workshops attended include: Finding Our Voices: Women and Creativity, at SUNY Orange Campus, with the late Lucille Clifton; The Omega Institute, with Sharon Olds; The New York State Writers Institute, with Peg Boyers, with a critique by Barry Goldensohn, at Skidmore College; the 2016 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, with past U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera; the Poets House, with Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs; and a SUNY Master Class Workshop, with Molly Peacock.