Ilyse Kusnetz

Small Hours (Truman State University Press, 2014), the debut collection by Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016), won the the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and was a 2014 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards Finalist. Kusnetz received an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and a Ph.D. in contemporary feminist and postcolonial British literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Stone Canoe, Rattle, Poet Lore, Atlanta Review, Kestrel, and Connotation Press: an Online Artifact. Her chapbook The Gravity of Falling was published in 2006 by La Vita Poetica Press. Her journalism and book reviews have appeared in The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel, and The New Statesman. She was a previous finalist for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prize, the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard First Book Award. Her essay “Stephen Dunn: A Manifesto of the Spiritual and the Sacred” appears in The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press, 2014), and she edited a feature on Scottish poetry for Poetry International (2014). She taught at Valencia College at the time of her passing.