Susan Stewart

1952 –
Read poems by this poet

Susan Stewart was born on March 15, 1952. She received a BA in English and anthropology from Dickinson College, an MA in poetics from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

Stewart is the author of seven poetry collections, including Cinder: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017); Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987); and Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981).

Stewart’s collection of essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. Her other books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received both the 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism; as well as Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford University Press, 1991); Nonsense (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1984).

Stewart also co-translated Antonella Anedda’s Historiae (NYRB, 2023), with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, for which they won both the 2024 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the Derek Walcott Prize; Euripides’s Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony.

About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman writes,

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.

Stewart’s honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer’s Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005.

Stewart taught at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1978 to 1997. She is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and a professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she teaches poetry, criticism, and aesthetics.