Susan Somers-Willett


Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry: Quiver and Roam. She is also the author of a book of scholarly criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, which was the first scholarly monograph on the poetry slam and which focuses on African American performance in slam and spoken word poetry.
Somers-Willett holds an A.B. from Duke University and an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Montclair State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. She currently works at the University of Texas at Austin.