Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” Her newest collection, 13 Questions for the Next Economy, gathers selections from her three previous books of poetry—Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders—as well as new poems, prose, and images.
Briante's creative nonfiction and essays on documentary poetics have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Jacket2, and The Believer. Her poems and essays have been collected in The Best American Poetry, Bodies Built for Game, and The Poetry of Capital, among other anthologies, and are forthcoming in Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser and differences. Briante’s poetry has been translated into Italian, Chinese, and Galician. El Mercado se pregunta, poet Giancarlo Huapaya’s translation of The Market Wonders, was published by Kriller71 (Barcelona).
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A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.
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​Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation.
She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and director of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups. She is also a member of the Detained Project a team of artists, scholars and activists who record and archive the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers. Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, creative nonfiction, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, and translation.
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Links:
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Reading poems at the University of Arizona Poetry Center
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