Susan Stewart

Susan Stew­art is a poet, critic, and trans­la­tor. Her five books of poetry include The For­est (1995), which received the Lit­er­ary Award of the Philadel­phia Atheneum; Colum­bar­ium (2003), which received the National Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award; and, most recently Red Rover (2008), soon to be pub­lished in Ital­ian trans­la­tion by Jaca Book in Milan.

Her song cycle, “Songs for Adam,” com­mis­sioned by the Chicago Sym­phony as a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the com­poser James Pri­mosch, had its world pre­miere with the bari­tone Brian Mul­li­gan and the CSO in Octo­ber 2009.

Stewart’s col­lected essays on art, The Open Stu­dio: Essays in Art and Aes­thet­ics, were pub­lished by the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press in 2004. Her col­lab­o­ra­tions with visual artists include most recently work with Ann Hamil­ton and San­dro Chia.

Her other books of crit­i­cism include the forth­com­ing The Poet’s Free­dom: A Note­book on Mak­ing; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which received both the 2002 Chris­t­ian Gauss Award for Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Tru­man Capote Award in Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism; Crimes of Writ­ing: Prob­lems in the Con­tain­ment of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion (1991);  On Long­ing: Nar­ra­tives of the Minia­ture, the Gigan­tic, the Sou­venir, the Col­lec­tion (1984), and Non­sense (1979).

Stew­art pub­lished her trans­la­tion, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, with Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press in 2009. She also trans­lated Euripi­des’ Andro­mache with Wes­ley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Sci­p­i­one with Brunella Antomarini. Cur­rently she is com­plet­ing a trans­la­tion of the selected poems of Milo De Ange­lis with Patrizio Cecca­gnoli and a trans­la­tion of Lau­do­mia Bonanni’s novel La Rap­pre­saglia with her Prince­ton col­league Sara Teardo.

A 1997 MacArthur Fel­low, Stew­art has received fel­low­ships as well from the Guggen­heim Foun­da­tion, the NEA, the Pew Foun­da­tion, and the Lila Wal­lace Foun­da­tion. In 2010 she received an Acad­emy Award in Lit­er­a­ture from the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Arts and Letters.

Stew­art cur­rently serves as a Chan­cel­lor of the Acad­emy of Amer­i­can Poets; she was elected to the Amer­i­can Acad­emy of Arts and Sci­ences in 2005.

This Autumn she is teach­ing a fresh­man sem­i­nar on what makes a poem a clas­sic and Eng­lish 205, Read­ing Poetry. In the Spring she will teach a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar on 18th cen­tury poetry and poet­ics. Her dis­ser­ta­tion advis­ing includes projects in 20th cen­tury African-American, Irish, British, Latin Amer­i­can, French, and Amer­i­can poetry, the fig­ure of the poet/critic, the his­tory of emo­tions in 18th cen­tury and Roman­tic poetry in Britain, issues of mem­ory in Vic­to­rian lyric, and the rela­tions between poetry and the visual arts.

Susan Stew­art has recent work in:

The Kenyon Review: “Two Poems on the Name of Ver­meer”
Chicago Review, reprinted in Poetry Daily: “The Sand-Castle”
The New Yorker: “First Idyll”

Recent essays on poetry include:

On Jorge Luis Borges in The Nation
On Umberto Saba in The Nation
Forth­com­ing on con­tem­po­rary Ital­ian poetry: http://www.parnassuspoetry.com

Recent interviews:

[Book show of the ABC, Mel­bourne]: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2334971.htm
WHYY, Philadel­phia, Radio Times: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2010/04/06/the-life-of-poetry/
Free Verse: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Spring_2003/interviews/S_Stewart.html

Forth­com­ing Autumn read­ings:
http://philoctetes.org/Calendar/Alda_Merini_in_Translation/
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/380

Photo reprinted with per­mis­sion from The Acad­emy of Amer­i­can Poets.