Terese Svoboda

Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.

Svoboda was raised in Nebraska.

Svoboda attended local schools, then matriculated at Manhattanville College, the University of Nebraska, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of Colorado, and the University of British Columbia where she graduated with a B.F.A. in studio art and creative writing. Columbia University awarded her an M.F.A.

Svoboda is the author of five collections of poetry, five novels, a novella and stories, a memoir and a book of translation. The opera WET, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at RedCat at L.A. Disney Hall in 2005. Her fourteen works in video have won numerous awards and are distributed worldwide. In writing about her work, reviewers have noted her frequent use of humor to address dire subjects, her interest in fabulism, and her lyrical use of language, especially as a poet writing prose. An ardent unconventional feminist, she often writes about women in the Midwest in a way that has been termed “exotic, sophisticated, and heartbreaking.” 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. Two books are forthcoming in 2015: Radical Poet Lola Ridge (Schaffner Press, 2015), and When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Poems Selected and New (Anhinga Press, 2015). She is presently writing a novel that concerns an Irish girl who emigrates to America in the 1860s when the Irish were known as "white niggers.”

Her essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Bomb, Ploughshares, the Atlantic, Narrative, One Story, American Poet, Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, Yale Review, Slate, and the New York Times.

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