Susan Sherman Explained

Susan Sherman (born July 10, 1939) is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice."[6]

Biography

Susan Sherman was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1939, to a first-generation Jewish American mother and father, a Russian Jewish immigrant.[7] Sherman grew up in Los Angeles, California, and worked on her school's student newspaper in high school.[8] [9]

Sherman attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy and English and graduating with her BA in 1961. She began writing poetry at Berkeley, during the years of the San Francisco Renaissance, and won the university's Emily Chamberlain Cook Poetry Award in 1960. She also became politically active, taking part in demonstrations against the violence perpetrated on students during the House Un-American Activities police riots in San Francisco in 1960.[10] She also received an MA from Hunter College in New York in 1967 in philosophy.

After graduating from Berkeley, Sherman moved to New York City and became active in the theater, poetry, and activist scenes of the East Village. She was involved in the literary circles at Les Deux Magots and Le Metro Café, and helped organize readings alongside Allen Katzman, Paul Blackburn, and Carol Bergé.[11] [12] Sherman served as the poetry editor for The Nation andThe Village Voice, to which she also contributed theater reviews and classified ads. She first met writer Grace Paley while working at The Village Voice.

She continued to write reviews for many newspapers and periodicals including The Women's Review of Books, Cineaste Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Her poetry has been featured in The Ladder, Judson Review, Intrepid, and Wormwood Review. In 1965, she taught at the opening of the Free University of New York (renamed the Free School) and later at the Alternate U.

Sherman was a founder and the editor of IKON magazine (first issue publication February, 1967), a journal devoted to the synthesis of art and political engagement, and the elimination of the authority of the critic as the arbiter of the creative process, and in the late 60s opened IKONbooks, an alternative bookstore which served as a cultural and movement center.[10]

Starting in the early 60s, Sherman began writing plays. She has had twelve original plays produced at Hardware Poets Playhouse, La Mama ETC, Tribeca Labs, Good Shepherd Faith Presbyterian Church, and St. Clement's Space. Sections of her play "10 Lbs. of Ground" was shown on WCBS-TV, and her English adaptation from Spanish of Cuban playwright Pepe Carril's Shango de Ima, originally produced at La Mama ETC, was video-taped by Global Village for television. The Nuyorican Production won 11 AUDELCO awards in 1996.[13] In 1967, she attended the Dialectics of Liberation conference[10] at the Roundhouse in London where she took part in a panel with Jerome Rothenberg and was a featured reader along with poets that included Allen Ginsburg. She traveled to Cuba in 1968 to participate in the Cultural Congress of Havana and returned there for an extended stay a year later. During the Congress she gave a paper on Radical Education, and deepened what would be a life-long friendship with another Congress participant Margaret Randall, the editor of Spanish; Castilian: El Corno Emplumado, whose family she had stayed with in Mexico City before embarking for Cuba.

In 1970, Sherman was one of the organizers of the Fifth Street Women's Building feminist squatters action,[14] [15] after which she became active in the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation Movement. In the early 1970s, she also traveled to Chile while Salvador Allende was in power. In 1975, she taught at the Feminist institute Sagaris,[16] and in 1984 she was invited to participate in  a conference on Central America and traveled to Nicaragua with Adrienne Rich. In 1982, she revived IKON as a second series, this time as a feminist magazine which, like the first series, was dedicated to creativity and social change. After almost twenty years, she returned to Cuba in the 1990s as part of a feminist trip organized by Margaret Randall.[17] [18] [10]

Her memoir of the Sixties, America's Child: A Woman's Journey through the Radical Sixties (Curbstone, November 2007) garnered critical acclaim from the New York Times Book Review,[19] Booklist, Publishers Weekly and Lambda Book Review and numerous authors, including Grace Paley, Claribel Alegria and Chuck Wachtel, and in 2012, her new and selected poems, The Light that Puts an End to Dreams was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Award.[20]

From her early years in the 1980s as a part-time faculty member at The New School (Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College), she was active in union organizing, and has remained involved in the continuing struggle to speak to part-time faculty working conditions. Re-energized as ACT-UAW Local 7902, the union finally succeeded in their negotiations for a first contract in 2004.[21]

Publications

Anthologies

Awards

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Sherman . Susan . November 1964 . The Palace of the Lowest Moon . September 16, 2022 . Poetry Foundation.
  2. Web site: Susan Sherman . September 16, 2022 . The Cafe Review. 2 May 2017 .
  3. Web site: The Color of the Heart Northwestern University Press. 2018-12-08. www.nupress.northwestern.edu.
  4. Web site: IKON Archives . September 16, 2022 . World Literature Today.
  5. Web site: Featured Poet/Writer of Issue # 7: Susan Sherman . Home Planet News Literary Review.
  6. Web site: Smith Silva . Dorsia . Susan Sherman. The Light that Puts an End to Dreams: New and Selected Poems . limited . September 16, 2022 . Gale.
  7. Book: Contemporary lesbian writers of the United States : a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook . 1993 . Westport, Conn. . Greenwood Press . 978-0-313-28215-7 . 526.
  8. Book: Lesbian poetry, an anthology . 1981 . Watertown, Mass. . Persephone Press . 978-0-930436-08-7 . 286.
  9. Web site: Anderson . Stephanie . 2023-06-06 . Interview with Susan Sherman . 2024-03-07 . Post45 . en-US.
  10. Book: Sherman, Susan . America's Child: a Woman's Journey Through the Radical Sixties . Curbstone Press . 2007 . 978-1-931896-35-1 . en.
  11. Book: Adrienne Cecile Rich . What is found there . 2003 . W.W. Norton . 978-0-393-31246-1 . 38.
  12. Book: Kane, Daniel . All poets welcome : the Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1960s . 2003 . Berkeley . University of California Press . 978-0-520-23385-0 . 40.
  13. Web site: History & Awards . 2022-09-21 . Nuyorican Poets Cafe . en-US.
  14. Web site: Cowan . Liza . July 26, 2012 . Side Trip: The Fifth Street Women's Building Takeover: A Feminist Urban Action, January 1971 . September 16, 2022 . Dyke: A Quarterly.
  15. Clausen, J. (2007). Susan Sherman. Lambda Book Report, 15(3), 14–15.
  16. Web site: August 29, 1975 . The Women Activists Found Little Peace At Bucolic School . September 16, 2022 . The New York Times.
  17. Book: Gordon-Nesbitt, Rebecca . To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture : the Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution . 2015 . Jorge Fornet . 978-1-62963-104-2 . Oakland, CA . 231 . 892432408.
  18. Book: Sherman, Susan . The color of the heart : writing from struggle & change, 1959-1990 . 1990 . Curbstone . 0-915306-90-5 . Willimantic, CT . 59–67 . 22376289.
  19. Web site: Dixler . Elsa . February 10, 2008 . The Time of Their Lives . September 16, 2022 . The New York Times.
  20. News: The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry . September 16, 2022 . The Publishing Triangle.
  21. Web site: About . 2022-09-20 . ACT-UAW LOCAL 7902 . en.
  22. Web site: Enszer. Julie R.. July 25, 2012. 'The Light that Puts an End to Dreams: New and Selected Poems' by Susan Sherman. Lambda Literary.
  23. 1991–1992 . The Nineties: Moving Forward, Reaching Back/A Multicultural Odyssey . IKON . 12/13 . 162 . World Archives.

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