Susan Stewart (born March 15, 1952) is an American poet and literary critic. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, emerita, at Princeton University.[2] In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[3]

Susan Stewart
Born (1952-03-15) March 15, 1952 (age 72)[1]
NationalityAmerican
EducationDickinson College (BA)
Johns Hopkins University (MFA)
University of Pennsylvania (PhD)
Notable awardsMacArthur Fellowship (1997)

Life

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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.[4]

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.[5]

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.[6]

Awards

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Work

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Criticism

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  • Nonsense: aspects of intertextuality in folklore and literature. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1979. ISBN 978-0-8018-2258-2.
  • Crimes of Writing. Oxford University Press. 1991. ISBN 978-0-19-506617-3.
  • On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8223-1366-3.
  • Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. University of Chicago Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-226-77414-5.
  • The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. University of Chicago Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-226-77447-3. a collection of her writings on contemporary art.
  • The Poet's Freedom:A Notebook on Making. University of Chicago Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-77387-2. a meditation on what freedom means to the artist.

Poetry

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Cinder: New and Selected Poems (2017, Graywolf Press)

Translations

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Anthologies

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References

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