Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry: ''Quiver'' (Virginia Quarterly Review Series, University of Georgia Press, 2009)University of Georgia Press website
/ref> and ''Roam'' (

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards are relatively large prizes given out each year to poets with unpublished manuscripts. In addition to the cash prizes, two winners get published by a university press. The ''Crab Orchard Rev ...

, SIU Press, 2006).Southern Illinois University Press website
/ref> She is also the author of a book of scholarly criticism, ''The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America'' (University of Michigan Press, 2009), which was the first scholarly monograph on the poetry slam and which focuses on African American performance in slam and spoken word poetry.University of Michigan Press website
/ref> Somers-Willett holds an A.B. from

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

and an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. She has taught at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Montclair State University Montclair State University (MSU) is a Public university, public research university in Montclair, New Jersey, with parts of the campus extending into Little Falls, New Jersey, Little Falls. As of fall 2018, Montclair State was, by enrollment, ...

, and the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. She currently works at the

.Susan B.A. Somers-Willett official website
/ref>

Selected works

''The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America''
University of Michigan Press, 2009.
''Quiver''
Virginia Quarterly Review Series, University of Georgia Press, 2009.
''Roam''
Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.

References

External links

Official Website
* Susan Somers-Willett's poe
"On Cancer" in ''Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts'' (25.1)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Somers-Willett, Susan Living people Year of birth missing (living people) University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts alumni Carnegie Mellon University faculty American women poets Michener Center for Writers alumni Duke University alumni