"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." —Bloomsbury Review
Svoboda's writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, 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 NEH fellowship, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and fiction, a New York State Council on the Arts grant and a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry. A University of British Columbia and Columbia graduate, she has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Fordham, Williams, the College of William and Mary, the University of Hawaii, the University of Miami, Fairleigh Dickenson, the New School, St. Petersburg, Russia, Nairobi, and held the McGee Professorship at Davidson College. Before obtaining her M.F.A. at Columbia, she filmed dance in the Cook Islands and traveled to Sudan, lving with the Nuer people, subjects of anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard. Svoboda acted as producer for the Columbia Translation Series and the PBS Voices and Visions series. She also created ten poetry videos and documentaries that have been shown on PBS, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty and internationally. Svoboda curated "Between Word and Image" for MoMA. 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. When not teaching, she writes proposals for new technology.