Susan Somers-Willett
Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry: "Quiver" (Virginia Quarterly Review Series, University of Georgia Press, 2009) and "Roam" (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards, SIU Press, 2006). 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" (University of Michigan Press, 2009), 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.