Susan Briante is the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders all from Ahsahta Press. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, will be published by Noemi Press in 2020.

Briante writes creative nonfiction and essays on documentary poetics as well as on the relationship between place and cultural memory. Some of these can be found in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Creative Nonfiction, Rethinking History, Jacket2 and The Believer. Her poems and essays been collected in the anthologies Poems for Political Diaster (Boston Review), The Force of What’s Possible, The Volta Book of Poets, Devouring the Green, The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem, among others.

A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals BOMB, Bombay Gin, Translation Review, and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, among many others, as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture.

She serves as the faculty liaison and educational facilitator for the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups as well as to lead workshops with local high school students. Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, affect theory, and translation.