Big Blue Marble is thrilled to welcome award-winning poet, critic, and translator Susan Stewart, who is also the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University.

Her new book, Cinder: New and Selected Poems, gathers poetry from across her thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.

A poet, critic, and translator, Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English. She is a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology and serves as the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. From 2009 to 2017, she was the Director of Princeton's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She teaches the history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

Stewart's most recent books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art; Crimes of Writing; On Longing; and Nonsense. Her most recent books of poetry are Cinder: New and Selected Poems (2017, Graywolf Press); Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. Her translations include Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, and she has published co-translations with her Princeton colleague Sara Teardo--Laudomia Bonanni's novel, The Reprisal-- and, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, two books of poetry by Milo De Angelis--Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini.