Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1956 |
| Occupation | poet, educator |
| Notable works | frank: sonnets |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2022 frank: sonnets |
Diane Seuss (born 1956) is an American poet and educator.[1] Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2022.[2]
She was born in Michigan City, Indiana and grew up in Michigan: in Edwardsburg and Niles. Seuss received a BA from Kalamazoo College and a MSW from Western Michigan University.[1][3]
She taught at Kalamazoo College from 1988 until 2016. In 2012, she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College.[3] She has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and Washington University, St. Louis. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.
Her poetry has been published in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker among many other places. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
The Los Angeles Times said that Seuss is "writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today".[4]
Critic Meryl Natchez writes that "in frank: sonnets, [Seuss] provides fresh imagery, calls out the male icons of the ’70s and early ’80s New York scene, and directly grapples with loneliness, addiction, abortion, and death. The language is often startling, the incidents pried open for the reader to enter and observe. The overall arc of the book is memoir: stories of grief, of questing, of trying to make sense of a complex life. These poems appear in the order written, with long sequences about Seuss’s father, her lovers, her exploits and failures, and the death of a close friend."[5] The Pulitzer committee described frank: sonnets as "a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt."[6]
Selected works
- It Blows You Hollow (1998)
- Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry in 2009
- Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2016
- Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018), finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
- frank: sonnets (2021), winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry[3], and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry[2]
References
- ^ a b "Diane Seuss". Academy of American Poets.
- ^ a b "The Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2022-05-09.
- ^ a b c "Diane Seuss". Poetry Foundation.
- ^ Chang, Victoria (August 24, 2018). "The complex poetry of Diane Seuss refracts the speaker's life through what she observes". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Meryl Natchez (2021). "Frank: sonnets". Rain Taxi (Summer 2021). Minneapolis, USA: Rain Taxi, Inc. ISSN 1943-4383. OCLC 939786025.
- ^ Ulaby, Neda (May 9, 2022). "2022 Pulitzer Prizes in arts and letters go to 'Fat Ham' and 'The Netenyahus'". NPR.org. Retrieved 2022-05-09.
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