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In 2007 Terese Svoboda won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir about her uncle as an MP who reported executions of GIs in the stockade he was guarding in postwar Japan — and then committed suicide. Robert Polito wrote: "Few books over the past decade have surprised and moved me as much as Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. A family romance in the guise of a biography and memoir, this is also a mystery in the spirit of writers as various as Dashiell Hammett and Sigmund Freud, Patricia Highsmith and D. W. Winnicott. Black Glasses is, as Svoboda intimates, a 'triptych,' a three-story house that spans World War II Japan and contemporary America, creating imaginative space for the intricate lives of her uncle and cousin as well as her own. Resourceful, elegantly phrased, angry, stubborn, fierce, beautiful and ultimately devastating." "A fabulous fabulist," wrote Publishers Weekly last year about Tin God, her fourth novel, ninth book. It was narrated by God — a woman, of course — and concerned the misadventures of a conquistador and two Midwestern dope dealers five hundred years later. Terese's writing has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, Bomb, Lit, Columbia, Yale Review and The Paris Review. Her honors include an O. Henry for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a PEN/Columbia
A year before obtaining her M.F.A., she traveled to the Sudan and lived with the Nuer people, subjects of anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard who founded the discipline of social anthropology on their culture. En route, she lived in the Cook Islands for six months and translated several Pukapukan songs, prelude to fulfilling a PEN/Columbia grant for Nuer song. She eventually published Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth, which was chosen by Rosellen Brown as a New York Times Writer's Choice. Her experiences in the Sudan inform both her second book of poetry, Laughing Africa, winner of the University of Iowa Prize, and her first novel, Cannibal. She spent fifteen years writing Cannibal, finally taking a class with the famed wild man Gordon Lish. Vogue called Cannibal "a woman's Heart of Darkness." Her second novel, A Drink Called Paradise, was partially based on her experience in the Cooks. Booklist called it "a stunning novel, frighteningly mysterious and complex." The New York Times called Trailer Girl and Other Stories "a book of genuine grace and beauty." In this novel she returns — as most authors do, eventually — home to Nebraska, with a novella about a wild child who hides in a herd of cattle. Svoboda's poems in her four published books (All Aberration, Laughing Africa, Mere Mortals and Treason) are written in both form and free verse, and she is very interested in the current dichotomy between lyric and language. As a result of her work abroad, she often focuses on subjects beyond American experience. In particular, her long poems show the seriousness of her effort: a reworking of Marlowe's "Faust," "Ptolemy's Guide to High School Reunions," a funny, forty-part review on aging and change, "The Death Dance," on sex and death as exploited in Polynesia, "The Ranchhand's Daughter," blank verse on incest, and "Laughing Africa," on the humility of an outsider to Africa's trials — and the title poem of the book that won the Iowa Prize. Treason, her most recent book of poetry, concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people. Eleanor Wilner wrote of the collection: "Cool, wry surface: depth charge of cry, of outrage, language at the edge of utterance, utterly original, black-bordered, indelible as we are not." Svoboda also wrote film proposals for a number of years, and acted as producer for the Columbia Translation Series and the Voices and Visions series. After finding PBS-commissioned documentaries fraught with compromise, she joined ranks with the new videomakers and created poetry videos and documentaries that have been shown on PBS, internationally, and at the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. She also curated "Between Word and Image" for MoMA. When not teaching, she writes proposals for new technology. Her libretto for WET, a chamber opera for Death and five voices, premiered at Disney's RedCat performance space in L.A. in November 2005.
News & Notes • Black Glasses Like Clark Kent was recently featured on Critical Mass. • Terese will be teaching fiction at the Manhattanville Writer's Conference, June 23-27, 2008. • To watch the video for Terese's next book click here. • Tin God was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. • Terese will be teaching in Ghana for the Pan African Literary Forum, July 3-18, 2008. • Terese's short story "Nude School" is available at The Rake; "The Story" is at Failbetter. Her "'80s Lilies," first published in the Indiana Review, was chosen for O. Henry Prize Stories 2006. "The Oscars" is currently available through Amazon Shorts. • Three of Terese's poems ("Bullet from a Bulletin," "Scylla," "Aspartame") are at Qualm; two more ("Prison Sex," "First Dance") are at Sawbuck. The anthology Deep Travel: Contemporary Poets Abroad includes "Ghost House," "New Zealand Silence" and "Obscenity." • Tin God was recently included in Lydia Millet's list for The Week, and was submitted to The Page 99 Test.
Tour Schedule 2008 •
01.09 KGB Bar New York, NY
Bibliography
"Delving into the past, in this wonderful, singularly wry memoir, turns up
enough guilt to go around for everyone. And yet, such is the honesty,
humor and literary skill of Terese Svoboda that she manages to turn this
sad story into a triumph of compassion and insight."
"When Terese Svoboda agrees to write the war story of her uncle, who served
in the American military police in Japan in the aftermath of World War II,
she enters a nightmarish world of secrets and irretrievable truths.
Lucid, self-knowing and artful, her memoir about getting the story will
resonate for readers of every generation."
"There are writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting
or the period or the plot or even the genre. ... Terese Svoboda is one of
those writers."
A collection unified by the theme of betrayal, it contains poems published in The New Republic, Paris Review, Volt, Slate.com, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly and many other literary magazines. "Cool, wry surface: depth charge of cry, of outrage — language
at the edge of utterance, utterly original, black-bordered, indelible
as we are not." A woman recently released from a mental institution sees a wild child in a herd of cattle. Or does she? Generations of abuse and hardship resolve in a trailer park murder. "Svoboda's tales are so shiver-inducing they could almost be ghost stories."
Based on the post-apocalyptic contemporary world of the Marshall Islands, a woman from an ad agency slowly discovers the horrors that nuclear testing has left behind. "It's sexy, powerful and surprising. It ought to be sung, not read, and in a low, harsh voice."
A collection of poems, including the long poems "Faust" and "Ptolemy's Rules for High School Reunions." "She triumphs, wriggling out of her own verbal knots with the energy and wit of a sideshow star."
Africa from the inside — inside the head of the woman who fears that the man she loves is CIA, that the film they're supposed to make is his cover, that she might be pregnant. "Cannibal has what many novels lack: guts, grist, balls, heart, lungs and a worldview horrifically, uniquely its own."
The long title poem concerns the humility of a white woman before the trials of Africa. Also includes "The Ranchhand's Daughter," a long poem about incest. "For readers who prefer the chill of a dry martini."
Contains poems published in The New Yorker, The Nation, Paris Review, Harper's and elsewhere. "A poet of unusual range and intelligence, Svoboda's ambition is impressive."
Nuer songs, with essays on their performance. "A vivid impression of modern Nuer society."
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Honors & Credentials
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John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist
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Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
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O. Henry Prize Stories
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Bellagio Fellow, opera
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Pushcart Prize, essay
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Voice Literary Supplement's Ten Best Reads of the Summer
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Spin's Best Books of the Year
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Bobst Prize, fiction
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New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, fiction
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Iowa Prize, poetry
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New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, poetry
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New York State Council for the Arts award, video
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Jerome Foundation Prize, video
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Cecil Hemley Award
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Emily Dickinson Award
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Creative Artists in Public Spaces Fellow, poetry
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John Golden Award, playwriting
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National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
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PEN/Columbia Translation Prize
Favorite Books •
Fishboy
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Omon Ra
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Wolf Whistle
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Autobiography of Red
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The Birthday Boys
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The Clam Theater
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Radio, Radio: Poems
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Venus Examines Her Breast
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Sara's Choice
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Everyone's Pretty
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