Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett was born in
Ohio and raised in New Orleans. After earning a B.A. from Duke University, she worked briefly in the New York City publishing
industry as a production manager, editor, and designer. Susan went on to receive an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in
American Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. She is the author
of a manuscript of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race and the Rise of Popular Verse in America.
Susan is also the author of a book of poetry, Roam, published as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition
in 2006 and featured in the November/December 2006 issue of Poets & Writers magazine. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in a number of periodicals including the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly,
Verse Daily, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and she is a former Co-Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She is also
the contributing editor for RATTLE magazine's Summer 2007 issue celebrating the 21st anniversary of the poetry slam. Susan
has received fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Dow Center for Creativity, and her honors include the
Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, VQR's Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination.
Both a writer and a scholar of verse, Susan teaches college courses in creative writing, contemporary poetry
and poetics, African American literature and culture, and gender and performance studies. From 2001-2003, she served as the
Assistant Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at Austin. While there, Susan also
developed the Poetry and Poetics graduate concentration in English. Her scholarship has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed
journals including The American Voice; Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies;
Teachers College Record; and Text, Practice, Performance Journal of Cultural Studies.
