In the last year of her life Deanna Pickard published two collections of poetry, Lose Them If You Can and In Dreams We Kiss Ourselves Good-Bye.

Her poetry appeared in Antioch Review, Blue Unicorn, Chelsea, Cincinnati Review, The Comstock Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, The New Republic, Nimrod Awards, Issue XIII, Passages North, Poetry, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Witness, and Zone 3—Rainmaker, Awards Issue, among other fine literary journals.

Her poems also appeared in the anthologies O Taste and See: Food Poems and I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems about Ohio, which featured “Not Poor,”. Pickard's poetry won many contests, including the 2004 Paul Laurence Dunbar Poetry Prize, The Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition, The Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and in 2003 The Literary Library Contest in Dayton, Ohio. She received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District. In 2003, Ms. Pickard was named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Association. Pickard passed away in 2004 after a three-year battle with cancer.