Susan Stewart (poet)

Susan Stewart (born 1952) is an American poet, university professor and literary critic.

Life

Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.

Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.

In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."

Awards

• Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, a Readers' Digest Writer's Award
• two National Endowment for the Arts grants
• 1986 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1995 Pew Fellowships in the Arts
• 1997 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
• 2003 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa, for Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
• 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, for Columbarium
• 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for Poetry and the Fate of the Senses

Work

Criticism

• a collection of her writings on contemporary art.
• a meditation on what freedom means to the artist.

External links

• Bio and additional info from Pew Fellowship
• "Susan Stewart", PennSound
• "On the Art of the Future", Slought foundation