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 new book, Cures Include Travel is just out from White Pine Press (2006).
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 from Washington State, 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, Massachusetts 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, 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 and the Antioch University MFA Program in Los Angeles. She is an active member of the Somali Rights Network, a non-governmental organization, an alum of Hedgebrook, and an editor at Floating Bridge Press.
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