Contest judge Reginald Shepherd selected her collection Blood Almanac as winner of the 2005 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Concerning that collection, Sandy Longhorn writes:

I wrote the majority of the poems in Blood Almanac in the course of one spectacular and fruitful year. It was the year when I first found my own voice and the year when I settled into twin obsessions -- the landscape of the Midwest, from which I come, and the landscape of memory, from which we all shape our identities.

At the core, this book is about how both landscape and memory shape the psyche. It is about observation of the natural world, as well as observation of the internal world inherent in the human condition. Many of these poems are based on my experiences as the child of children of farmers. My sisters and I were the first generation of our family born and raised off the farm, in the borderland where the city's fringes meet the field's fences. I was split from the beginning, one foot buried deep in the rich, black dirt of the cornfield and the other striking concrete sidewalks in town. For me, this sense of a split identity is tied inextricably to landscape, to my connection or disconnection with the physical space through which I move. It is at the heart of my desire to be both rooted and rootless at the same moment, a conflict that weaves its way through the bulk of my poems.

This book is also about the fluidity of memory and the way we shape our personal histories, our individual identities. Time and time again, I will swear a memory is honest and real, only to be proven wrong by family members or friends who were there, who have cultivated factual memories. My memory seems based in the imaginative and the fictive. And yet, is the re-made memory, the one re-visioned through poetry any less honest and real? Many of my poems are about self-creation, about my tendency to recreate myself by altering my memories. In the end, I am trying to say what is true for me; in the end, I am trying to articulate who I am and how I exist in the world in the hope that some reader somewhere will read a line and gasp or sigh in recognition, in understanding, in a shared connection.

Poetically, I am interested in where lyric and narrative intersect, in working with the strengths in each of these forms. I am interested in white space and line breaks, in the way silence creates room in which words collide and ricochet. I am interested in the kind of tension that can be made visually and linguistically with letters placed on the page. And I am interested in sound, in how the repetition of sounds creates density and intensity within lines, stanzas, and entire poems. These interests are directly descended from the poets to whom I am indebted, among them: Lucie Brock-Broido, Charles Wright, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and Davis McCombs.