Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss (born 1956) is an American poet and educator.[1]

She was born in Michigan City, Indiana and grew up in Michigan: in Edwardsburg and Niles. Seuss received a BA from Kalamazoo College and a MSW from Western Michigan University.[1][2]

She taught at Kalamazoo College from 1988 until 2016. In 2012, she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College.[2] She has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and Washington University, St. Louis. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Her poetry has been published in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker among many other places. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

The Los Angeles Times said that Seuss is "writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today".[3]

Critic Meryl Natchez writes that "in Frank: sonnets, [Seuss] provides fresh imagery, calls out the male icons of the ’70s and early ’80s New York scene, and directly grapples with loneliness, addiction, abortion, and death. The language is often startling, the incidents pried open for the reader to enter and observe. The overall arc of the book is memoir: stories of grief, of questing, of trying to make sense of a complex life. These poems appear in the order written, with long sequences about Seuss’s father, her lovers, her exploits and failures, and the death of a close friend."[4]