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 Shreela Ray (American poet) 

Shreela Ray (born 1942,Cuttack, Orissa, India; died 1994, Rochester, NY), American poet.

Biography

The daughter of distinguished Indian civil servants, Shreela Ray immigrated to the U.S. in 1960 and while still in her teens won an Atlantic Magazine national fiction competition. In 1966 she entered the Iowa Writer’s Workshop to study with William Meredith, Galway Kinnell and others. A year later, she entered the graduate Creative Writing program in the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she worked under Mac Hammond and John Logan, and formed lifelong friendships with fellow-poets Max Wickert, William Sylvester, Tom Duddy, and Dan Murray. After receiving her master’s degree, she moved to Rochester, NY, where she taught at Nazareth College, Monroe Community College, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. The poet Cornelius Eady, long before gaining national recognition, lived as a boarder in her Dartmouth Street home. Shreela Ray was married to Hendrick DeLeeuw, a high school educator, by whom she had two sons, Gawain and Kabir. The cause of her early death was a progressive lung disease.

Works

Shreela Ray’s first collection of poems, Night Conversations with None Other was published by Dustbooks in 1977 and republished in India as The Passion of Draupadi (1979). A number of her other poems appeared in journals and she was among the group of writers who initiated Buffalo’s Outriders Poetry Project.