A
poet, scholar, and performer, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is the
author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry and a book of
criticism. Her first book of poetry, Roam,
was selected for the Crab Orchard Award Series in 2006 and was a
finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for poetry. Her second
book, Quiver, was published
in 2009 with the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR
Series in Poetry. Her book of criticism,
The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry:
Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America,
was released in 2009 by University of Michigan Press and has been
cited by TheGlobe and Mail and The New York
Times. Somers-Willett's writing has been featured
in The
Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poets &
Writers, and The New Yorker.
In 2009, Somers-Willett
collaborated with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer
Lu Olkowski to create “Women
of Troy,” which documented the effects of the economic crisis
on the lives of working mothers in Troy, New York. The multi-media
project combines poetry, photography and audio footage to create
“documentary poems” for radio, the web, print and iPhone.
Somers-Willett's poems aired on
the nationally distributed Public Radio International/WNYC program
Studio
360 with Kurt Andersen and were published along with Kenneally's
photographs in the Virginia
Quarterly Review. “Women of Troy” has garnered
a number of awards, including a Gracie Award from the Alliance for
Women in Media in 2010.
Somers-Willett holds an A.B. from Duke University,
and 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
creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University, The University of
Texas at Austin, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.
Somers-Willett
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 Foundation Poetry Award, VQR's
Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination.
She currently teaches creative writing and poetics as an Assistant
Professor of English at Montclair
State University in New Jersey.