Terese Svoboda

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Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.

Career[edit]

Svoboda is the author of nine collections of poetry, six novels, three collections of short fiction, a memoir and a book of translations from the Nuer.

She graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts.^[1] She was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawaii.^[2] and McGee Visiting Professor of Writing at Davidson College.^[3] She taught at Columbia University School of the Arts.^[4]

The opera Wet, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005.^[5] Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide.^[6][7] In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects,^[8] her interest in fabulism,^[9] and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose.^[10][11]

An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed “exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking.”^[12] Her travels for the Smithsonian's Anthropology Film Archive to the South Pacific and the South Sudan provide additional settings. Postwar Japan is the location for her memoir about executions of U.S. servicemen by U.S. authorities.^[13]

Her work has appeared in AGNI,^[14] Granta,^[15] The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry,^[16] The New York Times, Narrative,^[17] Slate, Paris Review.^[18] The New York Post described her memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent as "astounding"; The Washington Post regarded her biography Anything That Burns You as "magisterial".

South Sudan[edit]

After translating the songs of the Nuer people of the South Sudan on a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, she founded a scholarship for Nuer high school students in Nebraska.^[19] She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.^[20]

Selected awards[edit]

• 1973 Hannah del Vecchio Award in Playwriting
• 1974 PEN/Columbia Translation Fellow
• 1978 National Endowment for the Humanities grant in translation
• 1983 Creative Artist Public Service fellow
• 1985 Emily Dickinson Award, Poetry Society of America
• 1987 Cecil Hemley Award, Poetry Society of America
• 1988 Jerome Foundation Fellow
• 1990 Iowa Poetry Prize
• 1990 Appleman Foundation grant for video
• 1990 New York State Council for the Arts grant for video
• 1992 Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance, co-director/writer of an ITVS-produced video selected by The Getty as one of the best two experimental biographies of the decade^[21]
• 1994 Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
• 1998, 1993 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
• 1998 Walter E. Dakin Fellow in fiction, Sewanee Writing Conference
• 2003 Pushcart Prize for an essay
• 2005 Appleman Foundation for WET libretto
• 2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
• 2008 Best of Japan 2008 in the Japan Times for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
• 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction
• 2013 Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund

Video[edit]

The highlights of Svoboda's video work include exhibition in Exchange and Evolution as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibition at RedCat,^[22] Ars Electronica, PBS, MoMA, WNYC, L.A.C.E., Lifestyle TV, Berlin Videofest, Art Institute of Chicago, CalArts, AFI, Long Beach Museum of Art, New American Makers, Athens Film Festival, Ohio Film Festival, American Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival (Director's Choice), L.A. Freewaves, Pacific Film Archives, Columbus Film Festival, and Worldwide Video Festival. She also co-curated "Between Word and Image" for the Museum of Modern Art and Poets House, an exhibition that traveled to Banff and the Northwest Film Center.

Bibliography[edit]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2020)

Poetry[edit]

Collections

• All Aberration ISBN 0-8203-0807-2 / ISBN 978-0-87745-272-0 / eISBN 978-1-58729-235-4
• Laughing Africa Iowa Prize in Poetry, ISBN 978-0-87745-272-0 / ISBN 9780877452805 / eISBN 978-1-58729-235-4
• Mere Mortals ISBN 0-8203-3424-3 / ISBN 978-0-8203-3424-0
• Treason ISBN 0970817762 / ISBN 978-0970817761
• Weapons Grade ISBN 1557289069 / ISBN 978-1557289063
• Dogs Are Not Cats (chapbook) ISBN 978-0-9885490-3-6
• When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems ISBN 1934695459 / ISBN 978-1934695456
• Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship ISBN 9781911335184
• Theatrix: Poetry Plays ISBN 1934695696

Novels[edit]

• Cannibal (novel) Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association First Fiction Prize, ISBN 0814780121
• A Drink Called Paradise (novel) ISBN 1582430012 / ISBN 9781582430010
• Tin God (novel) John Gardner Fiction book Award Finalist, ISBN 9780803245754
• Pirate Talk or Mermalade (novel) ISBN 978-0-982631-80-5
• Bohemian Girl (novel) Booklist Ten Best Westerns 2012, ISBN 9780803226821

Short fiction[edit]

Collections

• Trailer Girl and Other Stories ISBN 1582430853 / ISBN 9781582430850
• Great American Desert (stories) ISBN 978-0814255209
• Svoboda, Terese (2024). The Long Swim. Juniper Prize for Fiction. ISBN 978-1-62534-807-4.^[23]

Non-fiction[edit]

Biography

• Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet ISBN 9781943156573

Memoirs

• Black Glasses Like Clark Kent Graywolf Press Nonfiction Price, Publisher : Graywolf Press; Illustrated edition (Jan. 22 2008) ISBN 1555974902 / ISBN 9781555974909

Translations

• Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth (Nuer) ISBN 978-0912678634

References[edit]

• “Removing the sepia-tint: an Interview with Terese Svoboda,” Prick of the Spindle.
• “Like Prions: An Interview with Terese Svoboda by Shya Scanlon”
• “Terese Svoboda”

External links[edit]

• Author's Website
• Terese Svoboda on Fictionaut
• Caned