Susan Howe is an award-winning poet and critic whose work has been closely associated with the avant-garde movement of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and an alumna of the Stanford Institute of the Humanities. She held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1989-2007, and lives in Guilford, Connecticut. She has published several books of poetry and criticism, and her work has been included in many anthologies. Her most recent collection of poems, Souls of the Labadie Tract, was published by New Directions in 2007. New Directions also reprinted her earlier critical study My Emily Dickinson, with a new introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Two CDs in collaboration with the musician and composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, and Souls of the Labadie Tract, were released on the Blue Chopsticks label in 2005 and 2007. Another project, tentatively titled Word Rivers, with photographs by James Welling, will be forthcoming from Grenfell Press.
At the Academy, Susan Howe will work on a poetic sequence inspired by her discovery of the extraordinary manuscripts of Jonathan Edwards, the seventeenth-century New England preacher and visionary. His obsessive writing scraps of paper and then sown into books forms the basis for Howe's explorations of the tensions between modes of inscription and poetic language.