Hill-Stead Museum has announced the 2010 winners of the museum’s prestigious Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Competition judge Clare Rossini, Connecticut poet, professor and Director of the InterArts Program at Trinity College, selected first place winner Ginny Lowe Conners from a nationwide field of submissions. She will read from her manuscript Sunken Garden Poetry & Music Festival on July 7. a

An English teacher from West Hartford, Connors is the author of a poetry collection, Barbarians in the Kitchen (Antrim House) and editor of three poetry collections: Essential Love, To Love One Another and Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge (Grayson Books). She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the grand prize in Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Competition and first prize in the “Winners Circle” poetry contest sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines such as Calyx, Caduceus, Connecticut Review, English Journal, Jane’s Stories, Perigee, The Teacher’s Voice and others, as well as in many anthologies. In 2003, Connors was named “Poet of the Year” by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Connors is on the executive board of the Connecticut Poetry Society.

About her winning chapbook, Under the Porch, Rossini said, “…the poet's eye is sharp and true, and her sense of form beautifully honed, so the epiphanies of these poems are found both in their insight and their music.”