PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of five books of poetry, Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025), Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), Jesus Said (a chapbook from Orison Books, 2017), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012, a Lambda Literary Award finalist), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press). Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. The translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and a 2019 residency at the Gloucester Writers Center. Donnelly was 2015 – 2017 poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Donnelly regards his writing as “activist” in the sense that it insists on the subtle links between body and spirit, treats same-sex love as equivalent to all other love and desire, and interrogates topics like the AIDS epidemic with lyric strategies.
