Shelley Stenhouse

Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch). Her collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Allen Ginsberg Award, was a National Poetry Series finalist, and had two Pushcart Prize nominations (one by Tony Hoagland). Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Nimrod, Margie, Third Coast, Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, and Poetry After 9/11: An anthology of New York poets (among others).

‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse | Jolley Prize

August 2024, no. 467 • 23 July 2024

… And when they all were seated,A Service, like a Drum—Kept beating—beating—till I thoughtMy mind was going Numb from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburb ... (read more)