Susan Swartwout

Susan Swartwout is a professor emerita of English, Southeast Missouri State University. She is the author of the poetry book Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit (Brick Mantel Books), poetry chapbooks Freaks and Uncommon Ground, editor of Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors volumes 1 through 5 (partnered with Missouri Humanities Council), and the co-editor of Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry (Indiana UP), and A Student’s Guide to Publishing (Pearson). Among her writing awards are St. Louis Poetry Center's Stanley Hanks Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, the Davenport Award for Fiction, a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Writers residency. Over 100 of her poems, stories, and essays have been published in national anthologies, collections, and literary magazines.

Besides teaching creative writing and publishing at the university, she worked in the publishing industry for 27 years as an editor and copyeditor for various presses and 16 years as publisher for Southeast Missouri State University Press, which she founded in 2001 and through which over 230 student publishing interns received training. She also created and directed Southeast’s Small-press Publishing Program and Creative Writing Program, and edited two literary journals, Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi River Valley (17 years) and The Cape Rock: Poetry (5 years). She continues to work in the publishing industry as copyeditor of scholarly journals for a major university press and of manuscripts for individual authors. She’s a founding member of Pacific Wonderland Poets and is currently working on another collection of poetry.