Susan Stewart

A poet, critic, and translator, Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She teaches the history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics and also serves as the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

Stewart's most recent books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art; Crimes of Writing; On Longing; and Nonsense. Her most recent books of poetry are Cinder: New and Selected Poems; Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest.

Stewart often collaborates with artists and composers. Her song cycle, "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009. She also has worked with the Italian painter Sandro Chia, the Network for New Music, and the artist Ann Hamilton.