Background
Wheeler, Susan was born on July 16, 1955 in Pittsburgh. Daughter of Ray Barton and Grace Louise (Skeen) Wheeler.
( Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is ...)
Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity. In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago's Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: Record Palace: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie. Cindy, a lean, lonely white girl, has come to Chicago to study art history, to be anywhere but where she came from--tract housing in Thousand Oaks, California; mock-stucco buildings; "incessant sun and incessant sunniness of every blonde girl." Record Palace, littered with cans of malt liquor and remnants of past meals, also has boxes upon boxes of records--all jazz. And it has Acie, "big on all sides, top included. A hairnet, the hair below the net long and limp with oil. Green stretch pants, flip-flops, a thin black U-tank taut across Sumo folds." Cindy knows she doesn't belong, and this is why she stays. Cindy's determination leads to a tentative friendship with Acie, and she becomes a familiar, if not fully understood, presence in the store. But it is through her chance meeting with Acie's son that she becomes embroiled in an unusual crime. With prose that resembles the syncopated rhythms of jazz, Susan Wheeler offers a stunning portrait of a woman searching for an identity.
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(Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the w...)
Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a "miscellany," an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour. The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents. "In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space," and "Information is dark, not light," the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, Source Codes is not neutral in intent. Its appendices - HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author's first book, Bag 'o' Diamonds - attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint. Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge - between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within "slow space" - skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.
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educator university administrator poet
Wheeler, Susan was born on July 16, 1955 in Pittsburgh. Daughter of Ray Barton and Grace Louise (Skeen) Wheeler.
Bachelor in Literature, Bennington College, 1977; postgraduate, University of Chicago, 1979-1981.
Director public programs and information Art Institute Chicago, 1981-1985. Freelance consultant, editor and writer, 1983-1991. Director public affairs arts and science New York University, 1989-1995.
Comprehensive Employment Training Act writer and instructor Vermont Council on the Arts, 1977-1978. Instructor liberal arts School of Art Institute Chicago, 1984-1985. Instructor Poets in Public Service, New York City, 1989-1991.
Instructor New School for Social Research, New York City, since 1994. Thornton writer-in-residence Lynchburg College, 1995. Lecturer Rutgers University, 1995-1996, New York University, 1997-1998, University Iowa Writers Workshop, 2000, Princeton University, since 1999, Columbia University, 2004.
(Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the w...)
( Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is ...)
(The many meanings of economy are the ground for the media...)
Member Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association (membership committee), Academy American Poets, Poetry Society American, Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, Poets and Writers, Writers Guild, National Writers Union.
Married Philip Furmanski, August 23, 1991. Stepchildren: Lisa, Jonathan.