Susan Sherman

Susan Sherman (born July 10, 1939) is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine. Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice."

Biography Susan Sherman was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1939, to a first-generation Jewish American mother and father, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Sherman grew up in Los Angeles, California, and worked on her school's student newspaper in high school.

Sherman attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy and English and graduating with her BA in 1961. She began writing poetry at Berkeley, during the years of the San Francisco Renaissance, and won the university's Emily Chamberlain Cook Poetry Award in 1960. She also received an MA from Hunter College in New York in 1967 in philosophy.

After graduating from Berkeley, Sherman moved to New York City and became active in the theater, poetry, and activist scenes of the East Village. She was involved in the literary circles at Les Deux Magots and Le Metro Café, and helped organize readings alongside Allen Katzman, Paul Blackburn, and Carol Bergé. Sherman served as the poetry editor for The Nation and The Village Voice, to which she also contributed theater reviews and classified ads.

In 1967, she attended the Dialectics of Liberation conference after which she became active in the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation Movement. In the early 1970s, she also traveled to Chile while Salvador Allende was in power. In 1975, she taught at the Feminist institute Sagaris, and in 1984 she was invited to participate in a conference on Central America and traveled to Nicaragua with Adrienne Rich. In 1982, she revived IKON as a second series, this time as a feminist magazine which, like the first series, was dedicated to creativity and social change. After almost twenty years, she returned to Cuba in the 1990s as part of a feminist trip organized by Margaret Randall. Booklist, Publishers Weekly and Lambda Book Review and numerous authors, including Grace Paley, Claribel Alegria and Chuck Wachtel, and in 2012, her new and selected poems, The Light that Puts an End to Dreams was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Award.

From her early years in the 1980s as a part-time faculty member at The New School (Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College), she was active in union organizing, and has remained involved in the continuing struggle to speak to part-time faculty working conditions. Re-energized as ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union finally succeeded in their negotiations for a first contract in 2004.

Publications

Susan Sherman Barcelona Journal, IKON 2007 0-945368-14-3, 978-945368-14-4

Susan Sherman. Shango de Ima, English adaptation of a Cuban play by Pepe Carril, Doubleday, 1969, 1970 LCCCN 78-130887

Anthologies

Art on the Line: Essays by Artists about the Point Where Their Art & Activism Intersect, (ed.) Jack Hirschman. Curbstone Press: 2001 1880684772, 978-1880684771 , Reunie par Eliot Katz et Christian Haye. Maison de la Poesie Rhone-Alpes, 1997 Essays on the Line, ed. Jack Hirshman, Curbstone Press, 1997 The Arc of Love, ed. Clare Coss. Scribner's, 1996 00684814469, 978-0684814469 Poetry as Bread, ed. Martin Espada. Curbstone Press, 1994 Lesbian Culture: An Anthology, ed. Penelope & Wolfe. Crossing Press, 1993 0895945916 978-0895945914 Naming the Waves, ed. Christian McEwen. Crossing Press. 1988 0895943700, 978-0895943705 An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. University of Georgia Press, 1989 0820311227, 978-0820311227 Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory, ed. Paul Cater Harrison. Adaptation of Shango de Ima. Grove Press, 1988. 0802131263, 978-0802131263 Ixok Amar-Go, Bilingual poetry anthology ed. Zoe Anglesey, Granite Press, 1987 0096148863, 978-0961488635

Awards

New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Creative Non-fiction Literature, 1997 Puffin Foundation Grant, 1993 Residency, Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain, New York, 1992 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Poetry, 1990–1991 New York State Council on the Arts' Editor's Award, 1986 Coordinating Committee of Literary Magazines Editor's Grant, 1985 Creative Artists Public Service Grant, Poetry, 1976–1977 Emily Chamberlein Cook Poetry Prize, University of California, 1959–1960