Sara Ries Dziekonski was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award for her manuscript, Today’s Specials, which is projected to be published in the Fall of 2024 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. Sara is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We’re Open, which she wrote about growing up in her parents’ diner, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Marrying Maracuyá (Main Street Rag, 2021), which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and in the journals Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, 2River View, Connecticut River Review, Lily Poetry Review, Creative Pinellas Arts Coast Journal, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and teaches creative writing with Keep St. Pete Lit.
Sara delivers poems like the comfort food served at her family diner in hopes that the ordinary becomes magical, the forgotten ones are brought to the foreground, and that we feel more connected and less alone in our beautiful and messy humanness.
