Southampton - Poet Julie Sheehan received a 2008 Whiting Writers' Award on Oct. 29 at a ceremony in New York City. This prestigious $50,000 award recognizes 10 young writers for their extraordinary talent and promise and is one of the most coveted prizes for up-and-coming writers.

Sheehan is an assistant professor in the M.F.A. in Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton. Her books of poetry include Orient Point (Norton, 2006), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and Thaw (Fordham University Press, 2001), for which she was awarded the Poets Out Loud Prize. She was also the recipient of The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner Prize.

Her poems have appeared in Parnassus, Raritan, TSR: The Southampton Review, Salmagundi, Poloughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review and Yale Review, among others. Her work has been anthologized, most recently in The Best American Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins.

Born and raised in Pierson, Iowa, Sheehan graduated from Yale with a B.A. and earned an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. In addition to teaching at Stony Brook Southampton, Sheehan curates the Writers Speak lecture series and serves as Poetry Editor for TSR: The Southampton Review. She lives in East Quogue.

The Whiting Writers' Awards have been presented annually since 1985. Past recipients include Michael Cunningham, Kim Edwards, Tobias Wolff, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Mary Karr - all winners before they became acclaimed, bestselling authors. There is no application for the Whiting Writers' Awards. People throughout the literary community nominate and vote on winners via secret ballots.