Terese Svoboda is the eldest of nine children, the one who collected stamps,
wrote to penpals and pretended to live anywhere else than Nebraska. Eight colleges contributed to her exit while she worked her way through as a magician's assistant, a disk jockey, a rock reviewer and a bank clerk. A year before obtaining her M.F.A. from Columbia, she traveled to the Sudan and lived with the Nuer people. En route, she lived in the Cook Islands for six months and translated several Pukapukan songs, prelude to fulfilling a PEN/Columbia grant for Nuer song. She eventually published Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth which was chosen by Rosellen Brown as a New York Times Writer's Choice.
She spent fifteen years writing her first novel, Cannibal, finally taking
a class with the famed wild man Gordon Lish, who unscrewed her head and stamped her poetic license. The book won the Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association first fiction prize. Vogue called Cannibal "a woman's Heart of Darkness" and it was also chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by Spin. Her most recent book of fiction, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, the New York Times called "a book of genuine grace and beauty." In Trailer Girl and Other Stories, she returns — as most authors do, eventually — home, with a novella about a wild child who hides in a herd of cattle.
Treason, her most recent book of poetry, concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people. Many of the poems circle the subject of mother as betrayer, creator and destroyer, both seductive and maternal, the tie that terrorizes while it comforts.
Svoboda also wrote film proposals for a number of years, and acted as producer for the Columbia Translation Series and the Voices and Visions series. After finding PBS-commissioned documentaries fraught with compromise, she joined ranks with the new videomakers and produced poetry videos and documentaries that have been shown on PBS, internationally, and at the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. When not teaching at St. Petersburg or Miami
or Williams or William and Mary or Miami or the New School or Sarah Lawrence, she writes proposals for new technology. Two boys and a husband complicate her life with gusto.
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