Marty McConnell is the winner of the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize for her forthcoming second poetry collection and the author of GATHERING VOICES: CREATING A COMMUNITY- BASED POETRY WORKSHOP, published by YesYes Books. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, published by EM Press, received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award (Publishing Triangle) and the Lambda Literary Awards. McConnell transplanted herself from Chicago to New York City in 1999, after completing the first of three national tours with The Morrigan, an all-female performance poetry troupe she co-founded. She received her MFA in creative writing/poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and for nearly a decade, co-curated the flagship reading series of the New York City-based louderARTS Project. She returned to Chicago in 2009 to launch Vox Ferus, an organization dedicated to empowering and energizing individuals and communities through the written and spoken word.