Terese Svoboda
Terese Svoboda received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in writing. Her first book of poetry, All Aberration, was published in 1985 by the University of Georgia, and was nominated as an ALA Notable Book. Laughing Africa, published by the University of Iowa in 1990, won the Iowa Prize. Excerpted in the NY Times Book Review, Mere Mortals was published by the University of Georgia in 1995. Treason was published in 2002 by Zoo Press.
In 1995, her novel Cannibal won the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award, the Great Lakes New Writers Award and runner-up for the Paterson Prize and was published by NYU Press. SPIN magazine chose it as one of the best books of the year and it was hailed as "a woman’s Heart of Darkness
" by VOGUE. Her second novel, A Drink Called Paradise, published by Counterpoint Press in 1999, was chosen one of the ten best books of the season by the Voice Literary Supplement. The New York Times called her third book of prose, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, "a book of genuine grace and beauty." It was published by Counterpoint Press in 2001. Clean the Crocodile's Teeth, translations from the Nuer, was published by Greenfield Review Press in 1990, and was selected by Rosellen Brown for the "Writer's Choice" column in the New York Times Book Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the Wall St. Journal, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and O. Her poetry videos have been exhibited at the Getty, PBS, MoMA, MOCA, American Film Institute and abroad.Svoboda has held teaching appointments at U. of Miami, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, San Francisco State, University of Hawaii, Williams, the College of William and Mary, Fairleigh Dickinson, University of Miami, and Wichita State.
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My take on poetry starts somewhere between sex and surrealism, the two main forces of
my aesthetic time on earth. I like to get a lot for my money too, I’m into it for how
much you can get in a line—and I mean prose too. One day the car is here, next day
it’s stolen isn’t enough. I’m all for language poetry because that’s
all I’ve got, with a little sex and surrealism thrown in. That’s just oblique
Yeats, this sex and surrealism thing. Death is the ultimate surreal.
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