TERESE SVOBODA is the author of All Aberration, Laughing Africa, Treason, Mere Mortals, and Weapons Grade, and the chapbook, Dogs Are Not Cats.
A recent Guggenheim recipient, she has won the Iowa Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award and the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. A fellow at Bellagio, Bogliasco, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and the NEH, she also received a PEN/Columbia fellowship to translate Nuer song. She has taught at Williams, Columbia’s School of the Arts, Southampton/Stony Brook, the New School, San Francisco State, William and Mary, Fairleigh Dickinson, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Universities of Tampa, Miami, Fordham, Wichita State, and Hawaii, in St. Petersburg and Kenya for the Summer Literary Programs, and has held the McGee Professorship at Davidson College. She traveled to Kenya to talk to Somali refugees for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. The author of six books of fiction, a memoir, and a book of translation from the Nuer, she will publish a biography of the radical poet Lola Ridge in 2016.
Photo by Claire Holt