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Bio / Susan Tichy Since 1988, Susan Tichy has taught in George Mason
University's Graduate
Writing Program
(MFA Poetry),
where for five years she was
Executive
Producer of Poetry Theater: An Evening of Visual Poetics. In addition to graduate and
undergraduate
writing workshops she teaches modern &
contemporary
poetry, with
particular interests in women Modernist & avant-garde poets, poetic
form, sequence
& collage, "the poem including history," Scottish poetry and the
Scottish
traditional
ballad. Susan Tichy’s books are A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan, 1988) and The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983), a National Poetry Series selection, and Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta Press, 2007). A fourth volume, Gallowglass, is forthcoming from Ahsahta in 2010. Her work has appeared widely in the US and Britain, and has been recognized by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, by a Kayden Award for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and by nominations for the General Electric and Dewars Performing Arts Awards. Most recently, her poems have won awards from Indiana Review, Runes, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, which selected her poem "Stork" for the 2007 Chad Walsh Prize. She has served on award panels for the states of Illinois and Massachusetts, for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, and for the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2005-2007 she served as Poetry Editor for Practice: New Writing + Art. Tichy’s poems have
been praised
for sensual detail, a fine ear, and a willingness to engage “the
broader social,
political, and emotional issues of the world.” Her intention has always
been to draw
together threads
of the personal, the historical, and the political in a mode she calls
“an autobiography
of
imperialism.”
Tichy’s first book, The Hands in Exile, centers
on time spent working
on
the Golan
Heights in 1977. It was selected for the National Poetry Series,
received the
Eugene Kayden
Award, and was praised in The New York Times for an ability to
“confront questions
of
nationhood,
selfhood and the possible transcendence of both on a more
inward and
visionary plane.”
Tichy’s second
volume, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, resulted from
research into human rights abuse in the
Philippines during the Marcos years and during the Philippine-American
War of
1899-1902. It was
praised for political courage and (in Beloit Poetry Journal) for
“extraordinary richness
of sensitive personal observation, informed by the knowledge of the
historian, and colored
by the moral and political responses of a true poet.” Tichy’s essay
“Forms of
Temptation”
discusses the political and aesthetic issues of this work.
Subsequently, Susan
Tichy has explored the relationships between narrative technique and
political awareness.
She has turned increasingly toward collage and quotation, forms she had
used since the 1970s
and which became important in her second volume. In the 1990s she
wrote two collage
sequences and a number of dense, lyrical poems exploring the political
power of
representation. Her
newest
book, Bone Pagoda,
encompasses both lyric
and collage in an extended meditation on the Vietnam war. As a young
war protester in the 1960s, Tichy found her poetic vocation in the
context of that war. She married an American combat veteran and later
traveled with him in Vietnam. The poems of Bone Pagoda build these experiences
into layers of narrative and image both introspective and musical.
Poems from this volume appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Court Green, Denver
Quarterly,
Fascicle, Hotel Amerika, and
Indiana
Review.
Susan Tichy is also
working on a long-term project, Trafficke: An Autobiography, a
mixed-genre
meditation (verse, prose, collage)
on the myths of family and national history and on the power of
literacy.
Drawing on nearly
200
sources, it hunts and incorporates traces of a family history from
the 6th century Scottish
Highlands
to the beginnings of
slavery in early Maryland. An excerpt received the 1999 Prose Award from Quarter After
Eight, where Douglas Messerli praised Trafficke for its
combination of
erudition and engaging narrative.
When not teaching, Susan Tichy lives in a ghost town in the southern Colorado Rockies, where she is active in efforts to preserve open space and wildlife habitat. San Isabel Land Protection Trust Photo by Gushikawa Publications & Links - Bio - Links & Info - Susan Tichy's Main Page |