Suzanne Gardinier

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, poet and essayist Suzanne Gardinier earned a BA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Amérika: The Post-Election Malas 1-9 (2017), Notes from Havana (2016), Iridium & Selected Poems 1986–2009 (2011), Today: 101 Ghazals (2008), and the long poem The New World (1993), which Lucille Clifton chose for the Associated Writing Program’s Award Series in Poetry. Gardinier’s poetry has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (1989) and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (1989).

Gardinier uses formal constraints ranging from the ancient Urdu ghazal structure to an expansively split line of her own invention. In a piece for the blog Cayenne, Gardinier discussed her interest in “the body–the individual body, the sexual body, the body politic, the assailed body of the earth–in this time.” Making the body visible through writing, Gardinier alleged, was “to make a possibility for human survival on this planet. To listen to hunger, one’s own and that of others: for food, for touch, for liberation.”

Gardinier has also published a collection of essays, A World That Will Hold All The People (1996). She is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Excellence in the Essay, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in New York City and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College since 1994.