Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Poetry Festival founder Paul Muldoon introduces visiting poets for 2025 Timothy Donnelly, Jana Prikryl, and Nicole Sealey to SSCS.
SSCS opened its doors on Oct. 17 to four accomplished poets for its annual daylong school Poetry Festival. The festival kicked off with a morning assembly where high school students had an opportunity to mingle with these world famous visiting poets in the auditorium.
Supported by the Sharon Springs Klinkhart Hall Art Center, festival founder and Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon brought with him fellow poets Timothy Donnelly, Jana Prikryl, and Nicole Sealey. These poets read some of their published work, talked about how they developed a love for poetry and fielded a few questions from the students and staff.
During the afternoon, SSCS students interested in this medium had an opportunity to have their work critiqued by the visiting poets (see below). Students from Cherry Valley-Springfield, Canajoharie, and OESJ also visited SSCS to join in on the poetry festival.
Secondary English teacher Jennifer Field organized the SSCS festival and welcomed these “major stars” of the literary world to SSCS.
Face-to-face workshop with a poet
As part of the Poetry Festival, a group of SSCS students had an opportunity to attend a face-to-face workshop with visiting poet Nicole Sealey.
These students in the Creative Writing class had been working for weeks to get their poems written, edited and ready to present to the visiting poets. During a two-hour afternoon session they took turns sharing, reading and critiquing each other’s poems while getting writing tips from Sealey.
SSCS student participants included Isabella Cornwell, Tatianna Islip, and Madison Lynk (Grade 10), Augustina VanArsdal (Grade 11), and Hailey Cashman, Lilyanna Perrotti, and Gia Robinson (Grade 12).
Here is more information on our visiting poets for 2025
Nicole Sealey is an American poet who was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Florida. She is the former executive director of Cave Canem Foundation. She won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize for The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, and her collection Ordinary Beast was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her poem “Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” (Poetry London) won a Forward Prize for Poetry in October 2021.
Timothy Donnelly is an American poet and professor in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is the author of several acclaimed poetry collections, including The Cloud Corporation, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He served as the poetry editor of the Boston Review for 12 years.
Jana Prikryl was born in Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic, before eventually moving to New York City where she earned a degree in cultural criticism from New York University. She is the author of the poetry collections The After Party (2016) and No Matter (2019). Her poetry and criticism appear widely, in magazines and journals such as the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the Baffler, and the New York Review of Books. Her essays on photography and film appear regularly in the New York Review and the Nation.
