Connie Wanek

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, poet Connie Wanek grew up on a farm outside Green Bay and in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She studied at New Mexico State University. Her poetry collections include Rival Gardens (2016), On Speaking Terms (2010), Hartley Field (2002), and Bonfire (1997), winner of the New Voices Award from New Rivers Press.

Wanek’s image-driven poems often engage nature and natural order. Praising Hartley Field, poet David Orr observed, “Wanek is from Wisconsin, but her sensibility often seems Eastern European or Scandinavian. Like Szymborska, Wanek likes to end poems with poised yet cutting observations or intimations of dread that can turn ordinary activities into existential dilemmas.”

Wanek is also the author of a collection of stories, Summer Cars (2014).

Her honors include the Willow Poetry Prize, the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the Library of Congress. She coedited, with Joyce Sutphen and Thom Tammaro, the anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (2006).

She lives with her family in Duluth, Minnesota, where she has worked at the public library and as a restorer of old homes.