Patricia Fargnoli

Headshot of poet Patricia Fargnoli.
Patricia Fargnoli, born in Hartford, Connecticut, earned a BA from Trinity College in Hartford and an MSW from the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. A retired psychotherapist, she began studying poetry in her mid-30s. Her first book, Necessary Light (Utah State University Press, 1999), was published when she was 62. Since then she’s published three additional books and three chapbooks. Her latest book, Winter (Hobblebush Books, 2013), was the runner-up for the Jacar Book Press. Then, Something (Tupelo Press, 2005) won the ForeWord Magazine Silver Poetry Book of the Year Award, and it was the cowinner of the New England Poetry Club's Shelia Motton Book Award and an honorable mention for the Erik Hoffer Awards. Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2001) won the 2005 Jane Kenyon Literary Award for an Outstanding Book of Poetry. 
 
Fargnoli served as New Hampshire poet laureate from 2006 to 2009 and was past associate editor of the Worcester Review. She has taught at the Frost Place Poetry Festival, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, the Lifelong Learning program of Keene State College, and privately. Awards include an honorary BFA from The New Hampshire Institute of Arts and a MacDowell fellowship. Published in anthologies such as the Ecopoetry Anthology and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, her work has also appeared widely in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, North American Review, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. She resides in Walpole, New Hampshire.