Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb

Courtesy of the poet

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in New York City, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (she/her) earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Auden and the Muse of History (Stanford University Press, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. She edited Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Gottlieb created the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, an annual first-book award for poets of color, at Northwestern University Press in 2012. Writers who first appeared in this series include Jenny Xie, Nicole Sealey, Ama Codjoe, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.

Gottlieb is professor of English and comparative literary studies and the founding director of the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago with her husband and children.