Susan Somers-Willett

Susan Somers-Willett is an American author and academic working as a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Education

Somers-Willett earned an A.B. from Duke University, followed by a Master of Arts in creative writing and PhD in American literature from the University of Texas at Austin.

Career

Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry: Quiver and Roam. She is also the author of a book of scholarly criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, which was the first scholarly monograph on the poetry slam and which focuses on African American performance in slam and spoken word poetry.
She has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Montclair State University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. She currently works at the University of Texas at Austin.

Personal life

From 2003 to 2013, Somers-Willett was married to author and screenwriter Ernest Cline, with whom she has one child.

Selected works

, University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Virginia Quarterly Review Series, University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.