Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Career
Svoboda is the author of nine collections of poetry, six novels, three collections of short fiction, a memoir and a book of translations from the Nuer.
The opera Wet, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005.[5] Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide.[6][7] In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects,[8] her interest in fabulism,[9] and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose.[10][11]
An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed “exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking.”[12] Her travels for the Smithsonian's Anthropology Film Archive to the South Pacific and the South Sudan provide additional settings. Postwar Japan is the location for her memoir about executions of U.S. servicemen by U.S. authorities.[13]
After translating the songs of the Nuer people of the South Sudan on a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, she founded a scholarship for Nuer high school students in Nebraska.[19] She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.[20]
Selected awards
1973 Hannah del Vecchio Award in Playwriting
1974 PEN/Columbia Translation Fellow
1978 National Endowment for the Humanities grant in translation
1983 Creative Artist Public Service fellow
1985 Emily Dickinson Award, Poetry Society of America
1987 Cecil Hemley Award, Poetry Society of America
1988 Jerome Foundation Fellow
1990 Iowa Poetry Prize
1990 Appleman Foundation grant for video
1990 New York State Council for the Arts grant for video
1992 Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance, co-director/writer of an ITVS-produced video selected by The Getty as one of the best two experimental biographies of the decade[21]
1994 Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
1998, 1993 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
1998 Walter E. Dakin Fellow in fiction, Sewanee Writing Conference
2003 Pushcart Prize for an essay
2005 Appleman Foundation for WET libretto
2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize
2008 Best of Japan 2008 in the Japan Times for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent
2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction
2013 Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund
Video
The highlights of Svoboda's video work include exhibition in Exchange and Evolution as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibition at RedCat,[22] Ars Electronica, PBS, MoMA, WNYC, L.A.C.E., Lifestyle TV, Berlin Videofest, Art Institute of Chicago, CalArts, AFI, Long Beach Museum of Art, New American Makers, Athens Film Festival, Ohio Film Festival, American Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival (Director's Choice), L.A. Freewaves, Pacific Film Archives, Columbus Film Festival, and Worldwide Video Festival. She also co-curated "Between Word and Image" for the Museum of Modern Art and Poets House, an exhibition that traveled to Banff and the Northwest Film Center.
^"Terese Svoboda". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2024-05-01.
^"Nuer scholarship". www.theindependent.com. 17 March 2008.
^"Nuer scholarship". nebraskapress.typepad.com.
^"Margaret Sanger". www.wmm.com.
^"RedCat". www.redcat.org.
^Leichter, Hilary (2024-03-08). "Bad Parents, Beware. These Harpy Sisters Are Coming for You". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-05-01.
“Removing the sepia-tint: an Interview with Terese Svoboda,” Prick of the Spindle.
“Like Prions: An Interview with Terese Svoboda by Shya Scanlon”