Susan Briante

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011) and The Market Wonders.

Briante writes creative nonfiction and essays on documentary poetics as well as on the relationship between place and cultural memory. Some of these can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and Black Warrior Review, among others. Her poems and essays have been collected in the anthologies The Poetry of Capital,Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing, Poems for Political Diaster (Boston Review), The Force of What’s Possible, The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, and Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, among others. Her work was named a notable essay in The Best American Essays of 2019 (edited by Rebecca Solnit) and in The Best American Poetry of 2020 (edited by Tracy K. Smith).

A translator, Briante lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture.

She serves as the faculty liaison and educational facilitator for the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research with community-based environmental and social justice groups as well as to lead storytelling workshops with local high school students.