Terese Svoboda

Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Early life and education.
Svoboda was raised in Nebraska. She 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.
Career.
Svoboda is the author of seven collections of poetry, six novels, two collections of short fiction, a memoir, a biography 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. Her work has appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, New York Times, Slate, Paris Review. “Astounding” said the New York Post about her memoir, "Black Glasses Like Clark Kent"; “Magisterial” said the Washington Post about her biography Anything That Burns You. 
"Theatrix: Play Poems" is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in 2021. 
Teaching.
Svoboda has held visiting teaching appointments at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, Bennington College, the University of Miami, the University of Tampa, Fordham, Fairleigh Dickinson, Wichita State, Williams College, San Francisco State College, the College of William and Mary, Stonybook/Southampton College, and Columbia University's School of the Arts. Twice she has been the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and once the McGee Professor at Davidson College. She has also taught for the Summer Literary Seminars Program in St. Petersburg, Russia and Tiblsi, Georgia, the "Kwani?" LitFest in Kenya, and for the State Department and the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in Kenya. She has lectured at the Norman Mailer's Writers Colony, U. of Wellington (Victoria) Masters program in New Zealand, and as the Pabst Endowed Chair at Atlantic Center for the Arts.
South Sudan.
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. She was consulting producer for "The Quilted Conscience," a PBS documentary on South Sudanese girls learning to quilt with Nebraskan women.
Selected awards.
She has won a Guggenheim and the Bobst Prize for fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH and a PEN/Columbia grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, two Appleman awards, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is also a three time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Bogliasco, Yaddo, MacDowell, Hermitage and Bellagio residencies. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall in 2005.
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, 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.
Personal life.
Svoboda is married to the high-tech inventor Stephen Medaris Bull, and she is the mother of three children.