upstreet poet awarded NEA Fellowship

upstreet poet Yerra Sugarman (“We Were a Boat,” upstreet number four) has received a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship of $25,000 for Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002) received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award. Her second book is The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow, 2008). Her other honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, and its Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers.

Yerra was born in Toronto and lives in New York City, where she has taught creative writing in undergraduate and MFA programs. She is currently Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts, and teaches poetry at Rutgers University. You can visit her at her blog .