Susan Wheeler

Poet and novelist Susan Wheeler was born on July 16, 1955, and grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and New England. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in literature from Bennington College and did graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago. 

Wheeler is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and the novel Record Palace (Graywolf, 2005). Her books of poetry include Assorted Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which collects work from her first four books and her later work, Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012); Source Codes (Salt Publishing, 2001); Ledger (University of Iowa Press, 2005); and Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998). Her first poetry collection, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1993), was chosen by James Tate to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. 

About her work, John Ashbery writes:

Susan Wheeler’s narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity.

Wheeler’s awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Wheeler has taught at the University of Iowa, New York University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University. She is currently a professor emerita at Princeton University.