Susan Deer Cloud is a mixed lineage Catskill Indian (mostly Mohawk & Blackfoot). An alumna of Binghamton University (M.A. & B.A.) and Goddard College (MFA in Creative Writing), she has received various awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (most recent NYFA Fellowship awarded in summer 2011), a Chenango County Council for the Arts Individual Artists Grant, First Prize in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition (twice), Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award, and Native American Wordcraft Circle Editor’s Award for her multicultural anthology Confluence. She has taught Creative Writing at the college level and currently is giving readings and talks around the country.
Deer Cloud’s poems and stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies (Adrienne Rich Tribute Anthology; City of the Big Shoulders: an Anthology of Chicago Poems; Sister Nations: an Anthology of Native Women Writers on Community, Unsettling America & Identity Lessons multicultural anthologies, American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, To Topos (Poetry International), Florida Review, Mid-American Review, Ms. Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Many Mountains Moving, North Dakota Quarterly, Quarterly West, Earth’s Daughters, Shenandoah, Blood Lotus, Exquisite Corpse, Pembroke Magazine, Stone Canoe, Paterson Literary Review, Helicon Nine, etc.). Her most recent books are The Last Ceremony and Car Stealer (FootHills Publishing) and Braiding Starlight (published by Split Oak Press, October 2010). Our Parallel Universe, New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from University of New Orleans Press.
Deer Cloud has edited two published anthologies ~ multicultural Confluence and Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) ~ plus the 2008 Spring Issue of Yellow Medicine Review, a Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought. She is now an adviser to Yellow Medicine. Currently she is editing the Re-Matriation Chapbook Series of Indigenous Poetry for FootHills Publishing and just completed the second volume of I Was Indian anthology. She is a Board Member of YANAN (You Are Not Alone), a non-profit Native organization for preventing suicide among Native American young people. She served on two panels at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago (Narrative Poetry Panel & a second Panel on empowering indigenous students through Creative Writing), and she has had two panels accepted for the 2012 AWP Conference in Boston. In spring 2012 she read and spoke on the Maine Women Writers Indigenous Poets Panel in Portland on March 30th and spent a week’s residency in poet Vincent Ferrini’s old studio (Gloucester Writers Center) the third week of April; she gave a reading on the 19th at GWC and read at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum on April 21st.
