Biography for Susan
Rich (print Susan's Bio)
A transplanted Bostonian, Susan Rich is
the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps
Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the
World, (White Pine Press, 2000). Her book, Cures Include
Travel came out from White
Pine Press in September, 2006 and was "Highly Recommended" by Library
Journal. The Alchemist's Kitchen
is due out in Fall 2010.
She has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International,
an electoral supervisor in Bosnia, and a human rights trainer in Gaza.
Rich lived in the Republic of Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps
Volunteer, later moving to South Africa to teach at the University of
Cape Town on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Rich’s international awards include invitations from the
USIS to work in Zimbabwe as a writer-in-residence, a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie
Center in Ireland, and a Ruben Rose Award from Israel.
Other poetry honors include an Artist Trust Fellowship
and GAP grant from Artist Trust, the
Rella Lossy Award from the San Francisco State Poetry
Center, the Sojourner Poetry Award chosen by June Jordan, the Glimmer
Train Poetry Award and the William Stafford Award.
Her poems have appeared in journals both in the United
States and internationally including the Christian Science Monitor,
Harvard Magazine, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North
American Review, Poet
Lore, Poetry International, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry
Review and Witness. Anthologized poems, essays, and
interviews are included in Best Essays of the Northwest, Family
Matters: Poems of Our Families, O Taste
and See: Food Poems, Poem Revised: 54 Poems, South African Poets on
Poetry 1992-2001, Literary
Lunch, To Touch the World: the Peace Corps Experience, Voices
From the Field: Peace Corps Worldwise Schools and Writing the Journey: Essays, Poems,
Stories of Travel.
Educated at the University of
Massachusetts, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon, Susan
Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline
Community College. She is an active alum
of Hedgebrook, on the advisory
council of More Peace Corps
and a dedicated board member at Whit Press.
Beyond
Biographical Statements
Someday I’ll write a travel piece on the
places I’ve slept or tried to sleep while on the road, but who will
believe it? A hotel under gunfire in Croatia, a whorehouse in Mopti,
one haunted Edinburgh flat. As much as these nights are emblazoned in
my memory, they are not the reason I keep answering the allure of
travel still whistling at my door.
Responding to this calling, opening this blue door, sends me
somewhere more complex than these adventures imply. For me, the
external journey of the traveler and the internal mapping of the poet
are different sides of one central desire: the search for an extended
worldview. Perhaps my poetry is a kind of distilled reflection of my
travels, often written years after returning home. Almost a decade
elapsed between when I completed my Peace Corps service and began the
first poems of living in the Republic of Niger. I needed the passing of
time to let go of the literal. I needed time in order to forget what I
didn't know and to move into a more internal
mapping of my experience.
The act of mapping seems right to me in terms of
exploration: the poet’s and the adventurer’s. The process is ongoing;
the constant questioning of which road or line break to turn on and
which one to privilege or revise altogether. The daily accidents that
bring the poet, the traveler, into unexplored territory may offer new
experiences that knock us off balance, literally and figuratively so
that we no longer know who we are or where we stand. The poet-traveler
rearranges the geological terrain with her own nomadic coordinates. Who
could ask for more?