has a B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College and an interdisciplinary masters in art and writing from CSU Chico, Chico--where she developed a love for performance art as well as collage, printmaking and ceramics. She’s held workshops on creative language with thousands of adults, children, youth-at-risk and teachers.
Susan’s book poemcrazy: freeing your life with words was published in 1996 by Clarkson Potter/Random House. It’s a Book Sense (independent bookstore) pick. The hardcover edition went into five printings and was featured for over four years by Quality Paperback Book Club as well as Writer’s Digest Book Club. The paperback edition came out in 1997 (Three Rivers) and is in a fourteenth printing. Though most widely used by adults, poemcrazy is on the New York Public Library List of Outstanding Books for teens. Painters and songwriters as well as film makers and actors report that poemcrazy helps them loosen up, play and embrace a more creative way of being in the world. A photographer writes in Camera Arts magazine that he uses poemcrazy in his “Photoshop Master” class because “it says everything about the creative process.”
Susan’s chapbook of poems, Bathing with Ants, was published in 2004 by Bear Star Press. Her new book, foolsgold: making something from nothing (on finding a creative practice), will be published by Harmony (Random House) in 2007.
Currently, Susan is doing a third spring series to foster creative expression among people of all ages and backgrounds at workshops in rural California libraries sponsored by Poets and Writers organization and UCLA’s Center for the Book. She presents workshops and readings throughout California as well as in the Juvenile Hall School.
Susan helps people begin to delight in language and imagery. She encourages everyone to begin a collage journal and carry it everywhere. Some of her workshops now include collage with found objects in small boxes as well as journals.
Susan, whose two children have grown and migrated to San Francisco, lives in a co-housing village in Chico, California, at the edge of Bidwell Park (or Sherwood Forest)--where Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood was filmed.