Susan Comninos
Writer/Teacher/Poet
Biography
Susan Comninos is the author of a debut book of poems, Out of Nowhere (SFA/Texas A&M, 2022). Previously, her poetry’s appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review, among others.
She’s taught writing to undergraduates at Siena College, The College of St. Rose and SUNY Albany, as well as diverse group of adults in the community.
Her book considers the twin forces of legacy and chance and how they help shape identity. She has a special interest in fixed forms and how they organize or make sense of experience. Her writing also often explores the relationship between her Jewish background and the 21st Century. She lives in upstate New York.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Some of my poems are contemporary reworkings of piyyutim (or High Holiday liturgical poems) like “Avinu Malkeinu” and “Ashamnu.” Others explore the nature of inheritance and family bonds through Jewish folkloric symbols, like the Golem. Still others try to make sense of what’s been given to us by God, nature, or the whims of others: what Jewish poet and translator Stephen Mitchell, in his one-act play “Lamentations,” frames as “these events and emotions that appear out of nowhere, that are given to us, perhaps without our consent.”
Published Works
Out of Nowhere: poems (Stephen F. Austin Univ. Press/Texas A&M, 2022)
