Author Bio & Article Archives
Susan Rich
Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. Her newest poetry collections are Cures Include Travel and The Alchemist's Kitchen. She has taught in the Antioch University MFA Program in Los Angeles, is an active alum of Hedgebrook, and is on the board of Whit Press.

Author Archives: Susan Rich

Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. Her newest poetry collections are Cures Include Travel and The Alchemist's Kitchen. She has taught in the Antioch University MFA Program in Los Angeles, is an active alum of Hedgebrook, and is on the board of Whit Press.

What Your Furniture Tells You

The following exercise presented by Writing It Real in Port Townsend Writer’s Conference faculty member Susan Rich is from a poetry-writing workshop she presented at our 2007 writers’ conference. We publish it this week as a finale to our celebration of National Poetry Month. We hope you’ll email us your results from this exercise and…

Community and the Work of the Poet

At this past summer’s Writing It Real in Port Townsend writer’s conference, Susan Rich spoke to the conference group about building a writer’s community and finding a place in the world based on one’s passion for poetry. This week, I’ve interviewed her about the development of her books of poems and the ways in which…

Poems, Pastries and Politics

Why connect the writing of poetry with an appreciation of good food? On first consideration, the juxtaposition of poems and pastries might seem frivolous. Isn’t poetry sustenance for something more than the physical body? Recently, I taught a workshop at a local college advertised as “O Taste and Write: Food Poems,” and perhaps a subtext…

It’s Not How You Write, It’s How You Re-Write

This week we are very lucky to have an article about revision by poet Susan Rich, described by Naomi Shihab Nye on the back cover of her first prize-winning collection The Cartographer’sTongue as “a caring citizen of every heart-land.” Not only that, she is a brave and dedicated teacher: her article is filled with examples…