About Susie
I’m a poet, essayist, mother, and college writing professor living in Northern California. I was recently awarded a City of Berkeley Civic Arts grant to write about ancestry, journeys, and motherhood.
My debut poetry collection, Little Prayers, won a Blue Light Book Award and was published in 2018. You can read my poems in Salamander, Iron Horse Literary Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Willamette Week, Redactions, Red Rock Review, Bateau, Rock & Sling, Versedaily.org, and in the anthologies Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here and Ghazals for Foley, a book of poems written for slain American journalist Jim Foley. My poetry chapbook Faith (Finishing Line Press, 2008) was featured in the Chapbook Corner Roundup in Rain Taxi Review of Books.
My personal essays—on parenting, anxiety, infertility, and other realities of modern adulthood—appear in Girlboss, Elle, Salon, Offbeat Families, The New York Times Motherlode blog, and the book anthology Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness, and have been syndicated on Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, and more.
Born and raised outside of Boston, I am a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Since 2006, I have taught writing at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I live with my husband, the environmental lawyer Ben Eichenberg, and our two young sons in northern California.
What you can do next…
See updates and resources on my Facebook page
Author photos © Ashley Saks, Kelly Lynn James