 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
about |
Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett was born in Ohio and raised in New Orleans. After earning a B.A. from Duke University, she worked briefly in the New York City publishing industry as a production manager, editor, and designer. Susan went on to receive an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She has taught poetry and poetics at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Susan is the author of a book of poetry, Roam, published as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition in 2006 and featured in the November/December 2006 issue of Poets & Writers magazine. She is also the author of a book of scholarly criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Rise of Popular Verse in America (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2008) and a second forthcoming collection of poetry, Quiver. Susan's poems have appeared in a number of periodicals including the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is a former Co-Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and contributing editor for RATTLE magazine's Summer 2007 issue celebrating the 21st anniversary of the poetry slam. Susan has received fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Dow Center for Creativity, and her honors include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, VQR's Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination. Both a writer and a scholar of verse, Susan teaches college courses in creative writing, contemporary poetry and poetics, African American literature and culture, and gender and performance studies. From 2001-2003, she served as the Assistant Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at Austin. While there, Susan also developed the Poetry and Poetics graduate concentration in English. Her scholarship about poetry, poetics, and performance has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals including Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies; The American Voice; Teachers College Record; and Text, Practice, Performance Journal of Cultural Studies. |
