Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument (Noemi Press 2020), a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. Briante is also the author of three books of poetry:  Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders. Her essays and creative nonfiction can be found in Gulf Coast, Guernica, and Black Warrior Review. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. There she serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Her book 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025.

Photo credit: Farid Matuk