Adrienne Su
Adrienne Su, author of Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997), has poems in the anthologies The New American Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Pushcart Prize 2000, and The Best American Poetry 2000. Her essays, most of which fall into the genre known as "literary food," have been published in Prairie Schooner, Saveur, Girls: An Anthology, and The NuyorAsian Anthology. Recent poems appear in New Letters, Electronic Poetry Review, and 88.
Born in 1967 in Atlanta and raised there, Su attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia, where her mentors were Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, and Charles Wright. In 1995 she was the first Ralph Samuel Poetry Fellow at Dartmouth College, and later she held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. She spent three winters in Provincetown, Massachusetts (one of them on a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center) and several years as a writer and editor in New York City, where she briefly competed in slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café, including one season with the national team. She now teaches English and creative writing at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
Adrienne Su remarks:
"Poetry came to me from the languages, or nuances of language, that surrounded me while growing up in Atlanta. There were people all around me who spoke ‘Southern’; there were many others who spoke unaccented American English; my parents spoke both English and Mandarin Chinese; each of my parents spoke a separate dialect of Chinese with family members; our Chinese and Chinese-American friends and relatives had different degrees of accents in their English; and at school I had a wonderful Latin teacher, who taught me how to scan a line of poetry. I spoke only the second in that list, but I was constantly aware that there were many other ways to talk."