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about |
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 The Globe 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.
In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse on Vimeo. 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. |
