Leo Connellan, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetLeo Connellan
American writer
Date of Birth: 30-Nov-1928
Date of Death: 22-Feb-2001
Profession: poet
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius 
About Leo Connellan
- Leo Connellan (November 30, 1928 – February 22, 2001) was an American poet born in Portland, Maine.
- He grew up in Rockland, Maine, spent the 1950s travelling the contiguous 48 states, going back and forth between New York City and California, and lived at the time of his death in Sprague, Connecticut.
- He spent considerable time traveling in the United States between the ages of 19 and 32, when he married his wife, Nancy.
- He took work as a salesman after his daughter was born, moving his family to Connecticut in 1969 to take over a new sales territory in New England.Connellan's rough, "everyman" lyricism won him the admiration of such poet-critics as Karl Shapiro, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, David B.
- Axelrod and other major voices of the twentieth century.
- Connellan won the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and served as Connecticut's second Poet Laureate from 1996 until his death.
- His duties in this post were little defined, but Connellan said he saw promoting poetry in schools and supporting new writers as among his responsibilities.
- From 1987 until the time of his death, he was poet-in-residence for the Connecticut State University System.
- Connellan had himself attended the University of Maine.
- He was designated one of Maine's most prominent poets in the Maine Literary Hall of Fame.Connellan took among his themes the fishing and lobstering industries in Maine, and the lives of New York commuters.
- His work featured in anthologies, including Wesley McNair's The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse, and the Curbstone Press's Poetry like bread anthology of "poets of the political imagination."
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