Sara Ries Dziekonski

Sara Ries Dziekonski was Runner-Up for the 2024 Press 53 Award for Poetry for her manuscript, Today’s Specials. Sara is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We're Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Marrying Maracuyá (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2021), which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and teaches creative writing with Keep St. Pete Lit.

[Sara Ries Dziekonski] unveils truths of a family-run restaurant from the other side of your diner dinner plate. I could smell the food buried in the tension. The pace, the teamwork, the interaction with customers, both good and bad, become a solid core of the poet’s diner-sized revelations. Her poems made me hungry for more.

—Tom Lombardo, Press 53 Poetry Series Editor and judge for the Press 53 Award for Poetry