Get to Know the Poets: Susanna Childress, Oct. 6

Susanna Childress holds a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Florida State University. Her first book, Jagged with Love, was awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, the National Career Award in Poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Lilly post-doctoral fellowship. She lives in Holland, Michigan.


We asked Susanna a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Stacey Waite on October 6--here's what she told us:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like? 

SC: Um, I'm a big fan of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables; probably the attraction is sentimental nostalgia from my childhood/adolescence but I do love going back to those books and reading over Anne's dialogue and mischief. She's so strange and spunky and treacly. I do love her. 

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?

SC: I can't pretend to know who poetry-lovers have and haven't read, as I can't keep up with who's in and who's out and all that, but I would suggest Robinson Jeffers for anyone who is interested in environmental concerns and how those concerns were voiced by an idealistic, "outsider" poet way back at mid-century. He's Whitmanesque (but angrier) and has influenced most of the ecopoets today even if slightly unacknowledged (I know he was championed by Dana Gioia but I still don't hear much about him or his influence today)...

YAPRS: If you were stuck in an Iowa blizzard with any one person in the world, who would it be and why? 

SC: I'm afraid of famous people; I'm even afraid of people I admire, so I think I'd like to be stuck in a blizzard with my husband and my son--I know that's two people, but they're sort of one "unit"--because we could sing and read and make pancakes and watch movies and stay warm together and I wouldn't feel an inch of discomfort or oddness. 

YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing? 

SC: Transporting the reader. 

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?

SC: I'm terrified of being erased, whether by circumstance or my own mortality; what drives me is knowing I am a thinking, feeling, dervish-whirling human being--I need to get it down, as a record and a remembrance, of who I am, who I was, who I'm becoming... 

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be? 

SC: A patient in a mental hospital.