A Virtual Thirsty Lab with Beth Sweeney

The Thirsty Lab poetry reading, normally based out of Princeton, MA, continues to meet virtually. Join us on Tuesday September 29th VIRTUALLY ON ZOOM with our featured reader, Beth Sweeney.

Susan Elizabeth (Beth) Sweeney’s poems have appeared in Diner, Worcester Review, Journal of Irish Literature, and elsewhere, and have won an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize, and other awards. Her chapbook, Hand Me Down, was a semifinalist in the 2012 New Women’s Voices Competition. Close and Apart, a sequence of poems, was adapted by composer Matthew Jaskot and performed by a dozen musicians at the world premiere in 2023. 

A past president of the Worcester County Poetry Association, Beth now directs Mapping Worcester in Poetry, an initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2025, she guest-edited “Across the Mutual Landscape,” a feature in The Worcester Review; guest-curated the exhibit The Poem Next Door at the Museum of Worcester; and established the Worcester Poetry Archive there, which now holds over 1500 items. In 2026, Beth received the Stanley Kunitz Medal for Poetry from the WCPA. Her current project is The Blackstone, a song cycle written for adaptation by Matthew Jaskot, which will premiere in February 2027.

Beth holds the postion of Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, but she can often be found ankle-deep in autumn leaves or late winter snow at Elizabeth Bishop’s grave in Hope Cemetery, reading Bishop’s poems with other local poets to celebrate her birthday or honor her death.