Susan Kinsolving

Elmhurst, Illinois, United States

Susan Kinsolving is a poet and a teacher. She worked as a master teaching artist at Connecticut Commission on the Arts. She has taught at California Institute of the Arts and the University of Connecticut. Also, she conducts poetry writing workshops. Poet Susan Baumann Kinsolving showed early promise - she was a finalist for both the Yale Younger Poet Series and the Walt Whitman Award in the 1970s - but not until the 1990s did her poetry earn her a wider audience. The 1999 Grove Press publication of Dailies & Rushes collects together poems that first appeared in magazines and journals such as Grand Street, Kansas Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, New Republic, and Nation. The various themes of these poems include finding and losing love, politics, mourning, and self-reflection. Dailies & Rushes lakes its title from the lexicon of cinematography. “Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving’s debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot,” noted a review in Publishers Weekly. The review praised Kinsolving’s “complex imagery.” Fellow poet Carol Muske. writing for the New York Times Book Review, showered singular praise on Kinsolving’s work: “These are poems that have been lived in, breathed through, reseen and altered over time... The poems in this book represent the maturation of early quirky voice and the acquisition of a powerful and practical repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and irony.” Kinsolving has also published Among Flowers, a chapbook of poems illustrated with paintings by Susan Colgan. Kinsolving is a master teaching artist for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and she has taught at the California Institute for the Arts and at the University of Connecticut. Kinsolving’s collections of poetry include Peripheral Vision (2019) The White Eyelash (2003), Among Flowers (1994), and Dailies & Rushes (1999). She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Connecticut, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Hotchkiss School.

Susan Kinsolving Edit Profile

also known as Susan Baumann Kinsolving

teacher poet

Background

Susan Kinsolving was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, United States.

Education

Susan Kinsolving got a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts in 1972.

Career

Susan Kinsolving is a poet and a teacher. She worked as a master teaching artist at Connecticut Commission on the Arts. She has taught at California Institute of the Arts and the University of Connecticut. Also, she conducts poetry writing workshops.

Poet Susan Baumann Kinsolving showed early promise - she was a finalist for both the Yale Younger Poet Series and the Walt Whitman Award in the 1970s - but not until the 1990s did her poetry earn her a wider audience. The 1999 Grove Press publication of Dailies & Rushes collects together poems that first appeared in magazines and journals such as Grand Street, Kansas Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, New Republic, and Nation. The various themes of these poems include finding and losing love, politics, mourning, and self-reflection.

Dailies & Rushes lakes its title from the lexicon of cinematography. “Like prints rushed to the screening room, the poems of Kinsolving’s debut hit simultaneous notes of specificity and vagueness, as if the rest of the story remains to be shot,” noted a review in Publishers Weekly. The review praised Kinsolving’s “complex imagery.” Fellow poet Carol Muske. writing for the New York Times Book Review, showered singular praise on Kinsolving’s work: “These are poems that have been lived in, breathed through, reseen and altered over time... The poems in this book represent the maturation of early quirky voice and the acquisition of a powerful and practical repertory of formal gestures, including a startling backhand of wit and irony.”

Kinsolving has also published Among Flowers, a chapbook of poems illustrated with paintings by Susan Colgan. Kinsolving is a master teaching artist for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and she has taught at the California Institute for the Arts and at the University of Connecticut.

Kinsolving’s collections of poetry include Peripheral Vision (2019) The White Eyelash (2003), Among Flowers (1994), and Dailies & Rushes (1999). She has taught at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the University of Connecticut, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Hotchkiss School.

Achievements

Susan Kinsolving is an outstanding poet and teacher. Her book Dailies & Rushes (1999) 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.

Works

book
- Peripheral Vision
  (Peripheral Vision, Susan Kinsolving’s fourth book of poem...)
  2019
- The White Eyelash
  (The White Eyelash, she turns the extremes of her recent e...)
  2003
- Dailies and Rushes 1999

Views

Susan Kinsolving's poetry uses dark humor, rhyme, and received a form to explore loss, family, ephemera, and the natural world.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

"Susan Kinsolving’s poems gratify the senses, and if that were all they did, it would be much more than enough for even the most difficult-to-appease reader of poetry. They do something more, though: as the title of this beautiful volume suggests, they bring us in tantalizing proximity to the radiant mysteries that prowl just beyond the sphere of the senses. They are triumphs of perception and miracles of insight." - Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 3 Sections.

"Susan Kinsolving practices an enchanted speech that awakens us to the bright glare of surviving time, of passionate seeing, especially the natural world, and as a mother, wife, and daughter, of an art that honors our fragile yet sturdy relationships. These poems, more than an enhanced book of hours or remembrance of things past, are invocations soaked in the fluencies of sound and enriched by a palpable intellect that gifts readers so much charm, sublimity, and humor." - Major Jackson, author of Leaving Saturn.

Connections

Susan married William Kinsolving. She has two daughters.

Spouse:: William Kinsolving

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