Susan Kinsolving

Born in Illinois, poet Susan Kinsolving earned a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Her poetry uses dark humor, rhyme, and received form to explore loss, family, ephemera, and the natural world. In the New York Times, poet Carol Muske-Dukes praised its “powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and irony,” observing that “[i]t is compassion, tenderness for all the beauty and dross of the world, that turns her eye away from her own reflection and toward the enumeration of odd blessings.” The New Yorker described her poems as “grand and almost terrifying.”

Kinsolving’s collections of poetry include Peripheral Vision (2019)  The White Eyelash (2003), Among Flowers (1994), and  Dailies & Rushes (1999), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her libretti have been performed by the Baroque Choral Guild, the National Opera America Center, and the Glimmerglass Opera. Kinsolving has won the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award as well as several international fellowships. She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Connecticut, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Hotchkiss School.

She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut.