Leslie McGrath

Leslie McGrath was a poet and educator who frequently writes about the lives of women and the mentally different. She has been called "an oral historian of the alienated" by critic Grace Cavalieri.

McGrath's third poetry collection, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives, was published in June 2018 by The Word Works. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, she is also the author of two full length books of poetry, [Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage](http://lesliemcgrath.com/books/opulent-hunger-opulent-rage/ "Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage")(Main St Rag, 2009) and Out From the Pleiades (Jaded Ibis Press, 2014), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Toward Anguish (Providence Athenaeum, 2007) and [By the Windpipe](http://lesliemcgrath.com/books/by-the-windpipe/ "By the Windpipe") (ELJ Press, 2014.)

Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Gretchen Warren Prize from the New England Poetry Club, she has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as funding from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation. She has served on the board of the James Merrill House, the advisory board of The Word Works, and the poetry advisory committee at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT.

McGrath's poems and interviews have been published widely, including in Agni, Poetry magazine, The Academy of American Poets, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Yale Review. She teaches creative writing at Central Connecticut State University.

McGrath founded, and is series editor of, The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of The Word Works Press (Washington, DC.) The prize recognizes the work of mid-career poets.

She died in August 2020.