Poet and critic Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. She has also taught at Temple University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD in Folklore and Folklife Studies (1978). Stewart’s most recent books of criticism (all published by the University of Chicago Press) are The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011); Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005), a collection of her writings on contemporary art. Her most recent books of poems (also with Chicago) are Red Rover (2008), Columbarium, which won a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Forest (1995). Her translations and co-translations include Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini (Princeton, 2009), Euripides’s Andromache (Oxford, 2001), and the poetry and prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione. In 2013 she published two co-translations with Chicago: Laudomia Bonanni’s novel The Reprisal and Milo De Angelis’s most recent books of poetry, Theme of Farewell and After-Poems.

A 1997 MacArthur Fellow, Stewart recently served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and four years later she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has collaborated with contemporary artists Ann Hamilton and Sandro Chia, among others. In October 2009, Stewart’s song cycle, Songs for Adam, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by composer James Primosch, was premiered by the CSO with baritone Brian Mulligan and Sir Andrew Davis conducting.