Sally Connolly was born in the UK during the uncharacteristically scorching hot summer of 1976. This early discomfort spawned a life-long hatred of the sun, and consequently, she is rather disgruntled to find herself living in Houston even though the food there is excellent. She worked as a miner, artist’s model, literary agent and barmaid before settling on poetry critic as a life-long vocation. Her brother Peter currently holds the world record for skateboarding downhill at 91.17 mph.

Apart from a very brief flirtation with the law (as a practitioner rather than, as was family tradition, a criminal) she has expended almost all of her academic efforts on poetry. After spending several years studying at University College London she was finally prised out her glorious Bloomsbury existence by the lure of a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University. As a Visiting Fellow at Harvard she spent almost every waking hour either wallowing in the Robert Lowell archive at the Houghton Library or being led astray by the dedicatee of this book. She is very proud that she managed to infiltrate the Signet Society during her time there. Her first academic appointment was at Wake Forest University in North Carolina but she still doesn’t understand basketball or American football at all. Her favorite deadly sin is greed.

Connolly is currently Associate Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Houston. Her debut book Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets After Auden is the first to consider that specific sub-genre of elegy and was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2016. She is currently working on a book about the poetry of the AIDS epidemic. Her articles and reviews can be found in publications such as Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, Literary Imagination, Yeats Annual, Plume and the London Evening Standard.

Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetry,
an essay collection by Sally Connolly,
is now available from MadHat Press.