Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry, <i>Quiver</i> (VQR Series, 2009) and <i>Roam</i> (Crab Orchard Award Series, 2006), and a book of criticism, <i>The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America</i> (University of Michigan, 2009). Both a poet and a scholar of verse, she teaches courses in creative writing, contemporary poetry and poetics, African American literature and culture, gender studies, and poetry in performance. She was the first poet-reporter to be featured by IN VERSE, a groundbreaking collaboration between poets, photographers, and radio producers to create a new model of storytelling in journalism funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As both a scholar and practitioner of verse, I engage in dual creative and critical research agendas to understand contemporary poetry and its place in American culture. My research interests are interdisciplinary in nature, cutting across the fields of African American studies, performance, gender studies, creative writing, and poetics.

In my practice as a poet, I try to bridge different disciplines and styles. My second book of poetry, <i>Quiver,</i> spans fields such as mathematics and theoretical physics to produce poems that seek to reconcile the empirical truths of science with the emotional truths of human experience. I believe that poetry has a life beyond the medium of print, and I maintain an active reading schedule which includes broadcasts, performances, and multimedia projects. In one recent project, "Women of Troy," I collaborated with a photographer and radio producer to create a suite of documentary poems for print, radio, the Web, and the iPhone (see multimedia slideshow below). Recently, I have been exploring the history of photography (particularly self-portraiture) and the politics of the gaze in my creative writing.

In my practice as a scholar, I aim to bring traditionally disparate areas of study together under the umbrella of poetics. The body of my scholarship deals mainly with the cultural impact of poetry slams and how they serve as cultural stages for the performance of identity. Writing about popular verse in my book <i>The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry</i> has led me to think more generally about poetry's place in public culture, and over the last few years I have been studying how public poetry projects such as the Poetry in Motion campaigns, the Favorite Poem Project, radio broadcasts of verse, hip-hop performance, and podcasting mediate the relationships public audiences have with poetry across print and performance media.

In Verse: Women of Troy

In 2009, I collaborated with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski to create "Women of Troy," the first installment of the In Verse poetry series which documented the effects of the economic crisis on the lives of working mothers in Troy, New York. In Verse is a multi-media project that combines poetry, photography and audio footage to create "documentary poems" for radio, the web, print and iPhone. Several of the poems aired on the nationally distributed Public Radio International/WNYC program Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen and were published along with Kenneally's photographs in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Project Links

• View the multimedia slideshow "Women of Troy"