Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Chosen for 2026 Stanley Kunitz Medal
Susan Elizabeth (Beth) Sweeney has been selected as the twelfth recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Medal, presented each year by the Worcester County Poetry Association to “a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry by teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.”
Beth’s poems have appeared in Diner, Worcester Review, Friends Journal, Contour, Journal of Irish Literature, and elsewhere, and have won an Academy of Poets Prize, Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize, and other awards. Her chapbook, Hand Me Down (Finishing Line, 2013), was a semifinalist in the 2012 New Women’s Voices Competition. A decade later, Beth completed Close and Apart, a sequence of ten poems written for adaptation by composer Matthew Jaskot. The song cycle was performed by a dozen musicians—soprano Jennifer Ashe, baritone Brian Church, and a chamber group including members of a new music collective and an Americana roots band—at its world premiere in 2023.
Beth is past president of the Worcester County Poetry Association and founder of the annual College Poetry Contest, which awards the Elizabeth Bishop Manuscript Prize and Etheridge Knight Performance Prize to student poets from Central Massachusetts. She has taught creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross, mentored young poets at the annual Worcester County Young Writers Conference, served on the board of Poetry Oasis, and been an editor of The Worcester Review. Since 2022, Beth has directed Mapping Worcester in Poetry (MWiP), an initiative —supported by the Mellon Foundation through Scholarship in Action at Holy Cross —that identifies, documents, and marks sites connected to poems and poets while nurturing new poetry about Worcester places. MWiP has sponsored workshops; held the Poems in and out of Places contest; developed eleven virtual, driving, and walking tours on Worcester poets; created a brochure for the Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home; and hosted twice-yearly readings at Elizabeth Bishop’s grave in Hope Cemetery. In 2024, Beth guest-edited a feature section of The Worcester Review, also titled “Mapping Poetry in Worcester,” that combined innovative scholarship on major Worcester poets, spatial poetics, and urban studies with new poems connecting to those earlier writers “across the mutual landscape,” in Christopher Gilbert’s phrase. In 2025, she guest-curated The Poem Next Door—an interactive exhibit at the Museum of Worcester from May 16 to December 31, which brought to life six famous poems set in the city—and organized ten events to accompany it. One event, “Tales from Poetry Town,” led her to establish the Worcester Poetry Archive at the museum, which now collects materials relating to poetry in Worcester since 1971.
Besides contributing to Worcester’s poetry community, Beth is professor of English and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Holy Cross, where she founded and directed the English Honors Program; co-founded and directed the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program; coordinated the Creative Writing Program; and directed the College Honors Program. In 2019, she became the second person to receive Holy Cross’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for excellence throughout her academic career. A specialist in American prose narrative since 1800, Beth has published books and award-winning essays on detective stories, ghost stories, and modernist or postmodernist fiction, especially by Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Beth grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, graduated from Mount Holyoke College, and earned an MFA in Poetry and PhD in English at Brown University. She lives in Worcester with her husband, Michael Chapman, and their dogs.
The Stanley Kunitz Medal originated with a bequest to the Worcester County Poetry Association from the estate of former Poet Laureate of the United States and Worcester native Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). Sweeney will be the twelfth recipient of the medal, which is bestowed annually on a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry by teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.
Also honored with a nomination this year are poets Karen Elizabeth Sharpe, Joe Fusco Jr., John Keogh, and Christopher Reilley.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney will give a reading and receive her medal at a ceremony presented by the Worcester County Poetry Association at the Museum of Worcester on Thursday, July 23, 6:30-8:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public. (Doors open at 6:00 pm.) There is limited parking at the museum, with additional metered parking on the street and in the Pearl/Elm Street Garage. Visit worcestercountypoetry.org for details.