About Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss (born 1956) is an American poet winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022 with her book frank: sonnets. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Modern Poetry which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2024, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2021 recipient of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her poetry has been published in many magazines and journals are Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker.Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home. Her massive sonnets clock in at fourteen long lines, overflowing with syllables and rhymes that multiply, imagining new ways the sonnet can hold everything despite limited resources. Her expanded sonnet reinvents sprung rhythm in a meter spring-loaded with trochaic rhythms and trade-offs, playing on the sonnet's traditional push-pull. The Pulitzer Prize committee described frank: sonnets as a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt.
Browse all poems and texts published on Diane Seuss
