Susan Bright
Biography

Susan Bright is author of 19 books of poetry, three of which have been recipients of Austin Book Awards. She is the editor/publisher of Plain view Press, which since 1975 has published 100 books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States.

In England her poetry has been published in "Iron," edited by Peter Mortimer, "Poetry Street 3" (Longram) and in a small chapbookby Smith/Doorstop Books (The Poetry Business Press).

Her poetry is feminist, grounded in the routines of daily experience and often hilarious. Her two most recent collections, "Tirades And Evidence Of Grace" and "House of the Mother" both won Austin Book Awards.

Background

In Texas she has received a proclamation from the Senate honoring her literary and community work and in Austin she received the Woman of the Year Award in 1990 from the Austin Women's Political Caucus.

She works in a home studio near Austin's Barton Springs where she is a year around lap swimmer. Although she has a book entitled, "Swimming the English Channel," she has no intention of doing so, in spite of various invitations which have come from an erroneous listing of the book as a sports pubication.

She was founding director of a small press distribution organization in the 70's and 80's in the American Southwest and editor or "Women's Way" a feminist newsletter based on a festival of the same name which took place in the 1980s and 1990s in Central Texas during the month of March, which is Women's History Month in the US.

Her work as a creative process teacher has recently been collected along with the work of eight women writers from various parts of the United States in an anthology entitled, "Wind Eyes--A Women's Reader and Writing Source." Wind Eyes--A Woman's Reader and Writing Source

Partial List of Books By Susan Bright

Breathing Under Water

Layers of Our Seeing

Next to the Last Word
Poetry about the passion, mechanics and aesthetics of the word, more than a hundred new poems and selected early work--

"A dazzling reach--Athelstan and Little League, the voice of Shakespeare's Dark lady and the shrewd observer of late twentieth-century urban life, witty prose poems and a lyrical series of fourteen-liners. A joy to read and Bright's best book yet." (Betty Sue Flowers, poet and professor, UT Austin)

House of the Mother
Asearch for the nurturing part of the human. It takes a hard look at the enormous world consequence of diminishing the power of the mother, her life force--the healing and nurturing aspect of the individual.

Austin Book Award, 1994
Antique photographs primarily by James Dwight Safford

Tirades and Evidence of Grace
The "Tirades" are just that, how tired we are of the personal, environmental and political atrocities that have infested the planet. The "And" poems are about relationships, love. "Evidence" is a hard look at things as they are. The "Of" section of the book is about the death of the parent. The "Grace" poems are a difficult grace--how light filters through even the darkest hours so courage shines in our souls no matter what.

"They are snapshots of the soul." - Andrew B. Preslar, "Review of Texas Books"
Austin Book Award, 1991, Violet Crown Award, 1992
Photographs by Butch Hancock

Tirades And Evidence Of Grace Cassette Tape
Poetry performed by Susan Bright, short flute passages played by John Hicks. On tape are favorites like "Pie," "Ice," "White Paint and Blue Trim," and "Who the Hell is Gustav?"
44 minutes, $8.95.

Bunny
A trickster character who dies in every poem or does something so entirely stupid we wish that she would. "How desperately we need poets who can endure the vision, sacrifice bliss, and strip vagueness from such an enemy that must be named if logic is ever to be overcome by its superior--the heart."
Art by Randy Smith Huke
Small Press, October, 1990

See Also: Wind Eyes--A Woman's Reader and Writing Source
Coming Full Circle
Feminist Family Values Forum
Feeding the Crow
Everywhere is Someplace Else--A Literary Anthology