Susie Meserve

Hi. I’m Susie Meserve, poet, essayist, and college writing professor. I’m the author of the poetry collection Little Prayers, which won a Blue Light Award from Blue Light Press and was published in 2018. My personal essays—on parenting, anxiety, infertility, and other realities of modern adulthood—appear in Literary Mama, Elle, Salon, The New York Times Well Family blog, Offbeat Families, and the book anthology Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness. In 2021, with the support of a City of Berkeley Civic Arts grant, I’m working on a project called “Frontiers,” exploring immigration, ancestry, and motherhood.
Little Prayers
by Susie Meserve
Winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award from Blue Light Press
“Maybe the poet’s most important function is to visit the world and report what is found—to make us all aware of things we fail to notice. Susie Meserve takes this role seriously in her debut collection, “Little Prayers.” It’s a book full of wistfulness. And of wisdom gained from friendship, music, marriage and parenthood.” —David Roderick
Buy Little Prayers

More Than a Mother: On my Blog
Spring Equinox and Susie at Bay Area Book Festival!
Friends, here's what the Spring Equinox looks like here in Northern California. I got so excited about the torrential rains predicted last Saturday, a gig-postponing, movie-afternoon kind of rain. Instead, it sprinkled for an hour. Climate change and drought, folks,...
The Slideshow
It would take a thousand photos to really explain a year of Covid. We had one slideshow. New Year's Eve, 2021. We enjoyed a Covid-style masked backyard cocktail with friends and came home for a decadent fondue dinner just the four of us. I'd thrown the photos together...
High, Low, Buffalo: Surviving The Spring of the Virus
We made it through two weeks of homeschooling, two weeks of working from home with two kids around, two weeks of The Spring of the Virus. Even if the Shelter in Place order lasts into summer, into fall?God forbid?it will be springtime in my mind when my future wise...

Teaching & Speaking
I teach writing at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and read and speak regularly around the Bay Area. You can learn more on the Teaching & Speaking page, or contact me using the form below.
Author photos © Ashley Lauren Saks, Kelly Lynn James