About Maxine Susman...

Maxine Susman was born in Manhattan and grew up in Mt. Vernon, NY, eventually settling in Central New Jersey. As professor of English at Rutgers and Caldwell Universities and an exchange professor at Duksung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea, she has taught students at all levels, from many backgrounds, and from all parts of the world. For the past ten years she has taught poetry writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University, receiving its Distinguished Teaching Award.

Her poems are published in several dozen journals and anthologies, among them Fourth River, Canary, Blueline, The Healing Muse, Presence, Earth’s Daughters, and Paterson Literary Review, winning nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and elsewhere. Many of her poems are set in the Catskill Mountains, Maine, and Outer Cape Cod, as well as closer to home. They often tell about individuals finding their personal place in history; My Mother’s Medicine, her previous book, relives her mother’s story of graduating from medical school in the 1930’s, when few women became doctors.

She writes about states of body and mind, art, people and other creatures in the more-than-human world. Northern Swim is her 8th book.

Read about her new book, Northern Swim.