Broken Hallelujahs
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Summary
Sean Thomas Dougherty is a well known and respected poet who cuts across various schools of poetry, unwilling to trade a set "style" for the freedom to express his experiences through whatever form works best. Born in NYC in 1965 and raised in an interracial family with an African-American step-father, and a mother of mixed European descent, issues of identity and the complexities of history are crucial to Dougherty's work and drive Broken Hallelujahs. His mother's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Budapest Hungary and Uzzorhod in what is now the Ukraine. This connection to a mixed Eastern European past is a huge part of who Dougherty is as a writer and person. Thus his poetry, filtered by generations of assimilation, exists as a fusion of Eastern European and Afro-centric explorations, ideals, and forms. He strives to create a poetics which resists easy categorization in the same way that his resistance to a simplified notion of identity reaffirms his insistance on the complexity of being human. AWARDS CONTINUED: 2006 PA Council Fellowship in Poetry; 2004 PA Council Fellowship in Poetry; 2003 Penn State Junior Faculty Research Award.