Susan Firer’s most recent book is The Transit of Venus. She is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People: New & Selected Poems 1979-2007 and The Lives of the Saints and Everything. Her books have been awarded the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, the Posner Award, and the Backwaters Prize. She has also been the recipient of a Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, and the Lorine Niedecker Award. In 2009 she was given the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. Her poem “Call Me Pier” is included in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series and is available for viewing on YouTube and the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere website. Her poems “The Beautiful Pain of Too Much” and “Call Me Pier” have been choreographed by Janet Lilly and performed at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, New York City, and at the 2010 Milwaukee Lakefront Festival of the Arts. From 2008-2010, she was Poet Laureate of the City of Milwaukee. Firer was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. She lives and writes within hearing distance of Lake Michigan.
