Terese Svoboda

Svoboda at the 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival

Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.

Early life

Svoboda was raised in Nebraska.

Education

Svoboda attended local schools, then matriculated at Manhattanville College, the University of Nebraska, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of Colorado, and the University of British Columbia where she graduated with a B.F.A. in studio art and creative writing. Columbia University awarded her an M.F.A.

Career

Svoboda is the author of five collections of poetry, five novels, a novella and stories, a memoir and a book of translation.[1] The opera WET, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005.[2] Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide.[3][4] In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects,[5] her interest in fabulism,[6] and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose.[7][8] An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed “exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking.”[9] 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. Two books are forthcoming in 2015: Radical Poet Lola Ridge (Schaffner Press, 2015), and When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Poems Selected and New (Anhinga Press, 2015). She is presently writing a novel that concerns an Irish girl who emigrates to America in the 1860s when the Irish were known as "white niggers.”[10]

Her essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Bomb, Ploughshares, the Atlantic, Narrative, One Story, American Poet, Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, Yale Review, Slate, and the New York Times.

Teaching

She is currently teaching fiction at the Center for Fiction in New York City. She has held visiting teaching appointments at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, Bennington College, the University of Miami, the University of Tampa, Fordham, Fairleigh Dickinson, Wichita State, Williams College, San Francisco State College, the College of William and Mary, Stonybook/Southampton College, and Columbia University's School of the Arts. Twice she has been the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and once the McGee Professor at Davidson College. She has also taught for the Summer Literary Seminars Program in St. Petersburg, Russia and the Kwani? LitFest in Kenya, and for the State Department and the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in Kenya. She has lectured at the Norman Mailer's Writers Colony, U. of Wellington (Victoria) Masters program in New Zealand, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

South Sudan

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.[11] She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.[12]

Selected awards

She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ossabaw, The House of Literature in Greece, Liguria Study Center at Bogliasco, Italy, and The Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Video

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,[14] 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.

Personal life

She is married to the high-tech inventor Stephen Medaris Bull, and she is the mother of three children. They live in New York City.

Bibliography

Anthologies

Notes

  1. ↑ "Terese Svoboda". Retrieved 2014-10-16.
  2. ↑ "Anne Lebaron and Terese Svoboda: Wet". www.redcat.org. Redcat. Retrieved 2014.
  3. ↑ "Terese Svoboda". http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/. Experimental TV Center. Retrieved 2011.
  4. ↑ "Terese Svoboda".
  5. ↑ "Pirate Talk or Mermalade".
  6. ↑ "Tin God".
  7. ↑ "A Drink Called Paradise".
  8. ↑ "Weapons Grade".
  9. ↑ "An interview with Ladette Randolph". www.thenervousbreakdown.com. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  10. ↑ "Interview with author".
  11. ↑ "Nuer scholarship". www.theindependent.com.
  12. ↑ "Nuer scholarship". nebraskapress.typepad.com.
  13. ↑ "Margaret Sanger". www.wmm.com.
  14. ↑ "RedCat". www.redcat.org.

References

External links

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