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Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Careeredit
Svoboda is the author of nine collections of poetry, six novels, three collections of short fiction, a memoir and a book of translations from the Nuer. The opera Wet, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005.[1] Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide.[2][3] In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects,[4] her interest in fabulism,[5] and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose.[6][7] An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed “exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking.”[8] 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 Granta, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, New York Times, 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 Sudanedit
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.[9] She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.[10]
Selected awardsedit
1973 Hannah del Vecchio Award in Playwriting
1974 PEN/Columbia Translation Fellow
1978 National Endowment for the Humanities grant in translation
1983 Creative Artist Public Service fellow
1985 Emily Dickinson Award, Poetry Society of America
1987 Cecil Hemley Award, Poetry Society of America
1988 Jerome Foundation Fellow
1990 Iowa Poetry Prize
1990 Appleman Foundation grant for video
1990 New York State Council for the Arts grant for video
1992 Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance, co-director/writer of an ITVS-produced video selected by The Getty as one of the best two experimental biographies of the decade[11]
1994 Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
1998, 1993 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
1998 Walter E. Dakin Fellow in fiction, Sewanee Writing Conference
2003 Pushcart Prize for an essay
2005 Appleman Foundation for WET libretto
2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
2008 Best of Japan 2008 in the Japan Times for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction
2013 Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund
Videoedit
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,[12] 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 (Director's Choice), 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.
Bibliographyedit
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2020)
Poetryedit
Collections
All AberrationISBN 0-8203-0807-2 / ISBN 978-0-87745-272-0 / eISBN 978-1-58729-235-4
Laughing Africa Iowa Prize in Poetry, ISBN 978-0-87745-272-0 / ISBN 9780877452805 / eISBN 978-1-58729-235-4
Mere MortalsISBN 0-8203-3424-3 / ISBN 978-0-8203-3424-0
A Drink Called Paradise (novel) ISBN 1582430012 / ISBN 9781582430010
Tin God (novel) John Gardner Fiction book Award Finalist, ISBN 9780803245754
Pirate Talk or Mermalade (novel) ISBN 978-0-982631-80-5
Bohemian Girl (novel) Booklist Ten Best Westerns 2012, ISBN 9780803226821
Short fictionedit
Collections
Trailer Girl and Other StoriesISBN 1582430853 / ISBN 9781582430850
Great American Desert (stories) ISBN 978-0814255209
Non-fictionedit
Biography
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical PoetISBN 9781943156573
Memoirs
Black Glasses Like Clark KentGraywolf Press Nonfiction Price, Publisher : Graywolf Press; Illustrated edition (Jan. 22 2008) ISBN 1555974902 / ISBN 9781555974909
Translations
Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth (Nuer) ISBN 978-0912678634
Referencesedit
^"Anne Lebaron and Terese Svoboda: Wet". REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater). redcat.org. Retrieved 2018-01-01.