Terese Svoboda


Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
WWW teresesvoboda.com

Career

Svoboda is the author of nine books of poetry, eight novels, three collections of short fiction, a biography, a memoir and a book of translations from the Nuer.
She graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts. She was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawaii. and McGee Visiting professor of writing at Davidson College. Wichita State Distinguished Writer in Residence, University of Miami, Columbia University School of the Arts. Atlantic Center for the Arts Pabst Endowed Chair,
The opera Wet, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005. Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide. In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects, her interest in fabulism, and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose.
An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed "exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking." Her travels for the Smithsonian's Anthropology Film Archive to the South Pacific and the South Sudan provide additional settings. Postwar Japan is the location for her memoir about executions of U.S. servicemen by U.S. authorities.
Her work has appeared in AGNI, Granta, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The New York Times, Narrative, Slate, Paris Review. The New York Post described her memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent as "astounding"; The Washington Post regarded her biography Anything That Burns You as "magisterial."

South Sudan

After translating the songs of the Nuer people of the South Sudan on a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, she founded a scholarship for Nuer high school students in Nebraska. She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.

Selected awards

Video

The highlights of Svoboda's video work include exhibition in Exchange and Evolution as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibition at RedCat, Ars Electronica, PBS, MoMA, WNYC, L.A.C.E., Lifestyle TV, Berlin Videofest, Art Institute of Chicago, CalArts, AFI, Long Beach Museum of Art, New American Makers, Athens Film Festival, Ohio Film Festival, American Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, L.A. Freewaves, Pacific Film Archives, Columbus Film Festival, and Worldwide Video Festival. She also co-curated "Between Word and Image" for the Museum of Modern Art and Poets House, an exhibition that traveled to Banff and the Northwest Film Center. Her work is distributed by Vtape.

Poetry

  • All Aberration. / / eBook
  • Laughing Africa. Iowa Prize in Poetry, / / e
  • Mere Mortals. /
  • Treason /
  • Weapons Grade. /
  • Dogs Are Not Cats.
  • When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems. /
  • Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship.
  • ''Theatrix: Poetry Plays.''

Novels

  • Cannibal. Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association First Fiction Prize,
  • A Drink Called Paradise. /
  • Tin God. John Gardner Fiction book Award Finalist,
  • Pirate Talk or Mermalade.
  • Bohemian Girl. Booklist Ten Best Westerns 2012,
  • Dog on Fire.
  • ''Roxy and Coco.''

Short fiction

  • Trailer Girl and Other Stories. /
  • Great American Desert.
  • The Long Swim. Juniper Prize for Fiction

Non-fiction

;Biography
  • Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet.
;Memoirs
  • Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.
;Translations
  • ''Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth.''