Ivy Schweitzer
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ivy Schweitzer lives in Vermont and taught American literature and WGSS for many years at Dartmouth College. She has published poetry in Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, The Glass Seed Annual, Solidus 3, Negative Capability, Stonefence Review, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Antiphon volume 19, Clear Poetry, and most recently in Passager, Tikkun Magazine, Ritualwell, The New Croton Review, The Mississippi Review and The Spoon River Poetry Review. In 2018, she felt called by Emily Dickinson to spend a year immersed in that poet’s most creative period in which she wrote almost a poem a day; the result is a year-long weekly blog called White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862. She is currently revising a full-length poetry manuscript title Tumult with Stretch Marks.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
As a Jewish woman, raised in a Jewish household and Brooklyn, New York culture, the relationship is fundamental but not often stated. Recently, I find myself called to write poems that explore my particular identity as a white Jewish woman and the racism I imbibed from growing up in a particular time and place. As Paisley Rekdal says, “the story of racism does not simply happen to people of color.” These poems are my attempt to understand how my own racial thinking has been shaped, what damage it has done, and how it can be renovated. I have come to see these difficult poems, which make readers squirm—which make me squirm—in Adrienne Rich’s resonating words: “I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.”
Published Works
Scholarly Books
Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
Edited Collections
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of the Occom Circle; co-edited with Gordon Henry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2019)
Companion to The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology; co-edited with Susan Castillo (Blackwell Publishers, 2005)
Anthologies
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, general editor, Paul Lauter, 4th, 5th, 6th editions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008) editor of Volume A, Colonial Period to 1800. 7th edition, 2013, and Concise Edition, 2 vols. 2014.
The Compact Heath Anthology of American Literature. general editor, Paul Lauter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology; co-edited with Susan Castillo (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York,1973, B.A. in English Literature: Honors in English, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; June, 1980, 1983, M.A. and PhD American Literature. Thesis advisor: Allen Grossman and Michael Gilmore