The Forest (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Susan Stewart was born March 15, 1952, in York, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor's degree in English and anthropology in 1973, received a master's degree in poetry from Johns Hopkins University in 1975, and earned a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. In 1978, Stewart also joined the faculty of Temple University as an assistant professor of English, becoming associate professor in 1981 and full professor in 1985. Since 1997, she has been the Regan Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches the history of lyric poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature.

Stewart's first collection of poetry was Yellow Stars and Ice (1981). As of 2004, she had published three more collections: The Hive: Poems (1987), which won the Georgia Press Second Book award; The Forest (1995), in which "The Forest" appears; and Columbarium (2003), which won a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award.

In addition to poetry, Stewart has also published a number of books of literary and aesthetic theory. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1989) examines the uses of "nonsense" in the work of Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and others. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984) studies large and small objects and discusses souvenir collecting in the West. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991) is an examination of so-called criminal forms of writing, such as graffiti, forgery, plagiarism, and pornography. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) is a general theory of poetic forms; it won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award in literary criticism. Stewart's collected essays on art titled The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics were published in January 2005.

Stewart is the recipient of a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award; three grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts; a 1995 Pew Fellowship in the arts; a 1995 Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writer's Award for poetry; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1986 – 1987) and the MacArthur Foundation (1997). According to the Pew Fellowships in the Arts Web site, the MacArthur Foundation said of Stewart upon bestowal of her MacArthur fellowship: "Investigating themes such as miniaturization, giganticism, plagiarism, forgery, the souvenir, the collection, Stewart often makes strange and disorienting that which we usually take to be familiar and of common sense."