After teaching at Princeton for fourteen years and directing the Program in Creative Writing for five years, Susan Wheeler transitioned to emeritus status on July 1, 2024. From the outset, Susan’s life and work have been about art and expression in all its multivariable forms, from Chicago jazz to German Expressionism to collage, whether rendered in language, as visual construction, or embodied in gesture, movement, or object design. She is ever exploring similarities and differences in relationships between ideas, sounds, and images. Her virtuoso investigations into questions of needs and love and their presence or absence, and the ways generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission lead her readers to examine losses, including those losses that perhaps never actually happened. The poetic results of these investigations are masterfully inventive, darkly humorous, and sometimes devastatingly sad. 

Born on July 16, 1955, Susan grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and in New England. After earning her bachelor of arts in literature from Bennington College in 1977, she went on to do graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago. 

Esteemed critic Marjorie Perloff described Susan as “that rare thing among poets, a genuine cultural critic; her poems use image and allusion with such exactitude that we see the things around us—from pop tarts to polyvinyl toilet seats—as if for the first time.” 

In 1993, Susan’s first poetry collection, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, was selected by poet James Tate to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The book’s title was described as illustrative of all her work to follow: vivid and musical, unpredictable, edgy. Her next volume, Smokes, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998 and was chosen by poet Robert Hass for the Four Way Books Award Series. Source Codes (2001) is a project book made up of numbered and linked poems and collages, rich with references, appendices, and computer source code. Canonical poet John Ashbery described her collection Ledger (2005) as a treasure map for those willing to understand the journey: “Susan Wheeler’s narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity: that of ‘the jangling discourse of our nation.’” Ledger was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Susan is also the author of the novel Record Palace (2005). The work is set in Chicago during the pivotal transitional period between the late 1970s and early ’80s and is a medley of voices: a reflection of the ubiquitous LPs that captured the music of the time and jazz, in particular. Novelist E.L. Doctorow called it “dialogic, atmospheric, a situation plumbed rather than a plot unfolded—a Chicago noir this is and it casts its spell.” Toni Morrison called the book “an astonishment. Susan Wheeler’s deft touch and flawless ear have produced an irresistible work, both fresh and sage.” Susan’s Assorted Poems (2009), which drew from her first four books, was described as a “must read,” exemplifying what critic Harold Bloom called “an intricate splendor and triumphant fusion of technique and vision.” The collection moves through the art of the northern Renaissance to corporate logos in poems described as rigorous, vibrant, and thoughtful. Exuberant, subtle, and endlessly inventive, her book Meme (2012) was shortlisted for a National Book Award in Poetry. As the poet Robert Pinsky has said, “Susan Wheeler is interested in the choppy, crazy images and motives in consumer culture; she loves to navigate through the hype to find the actual emotions that drive it all.” 

Susan’s honors include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in eight editions of The Best American Poetry, as well as in the Paris Review, New American Writing, Talisman, Tin House, the New Yorker, and many other journals. Susan was Princeton’s Old Dominion Faculty Fellow from 2013 to 2015. She has received two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, a Vermont Arts Council grant, and the Fund for Poetry Grant, and she has had residencies at Yaddo and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her works have been finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, John Billings Fiske Poetry Prize, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Boston Review Award for Poetry, among many others. 

At Princeton, Susan has taught courses in introductory and advanced poetry writing, the team-taught Words as Objects, writing fiction, and the fiction workshop. Before joining the Princeton faculty, she taught in MFA programs at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Additionally, Susan has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Poets in Public Service in New York City, the New School for Social Research, Rutgers University, and Lynchburg College, where she was the Richard H. Thornton Writer-in-Residence. 

Susan is beloved by her Princeton students and colleagues. Her enthusiasm for and fluency in all things creative inspires collaboration and multidisciplinary exchange across a wide range of departments and programs. Her compassion and sensitivity enable her to mentor her students across the full spectrum of creative processes as well as in the larger subject of life. 

Written by members of the Program in Creative Writing faculty.