Susan Kirby-Smith

About Me

I am a writer who lives in Baton Rouge. I also curate an online literary magazine called Unmoveable Feast. (http://www.unmoveablefeast.com)

I currently teach English at Louisiana States University and assist in acquisitions at LSU Press. I have worked for several years as an editor or reader at other magazines and presses including The Southern Review, Cave Wall, Carolina Wren Press and the New Delta Review.

I am working on a novel, several plays, few short stories, and a collection of poems.

Why do you write?

I grew up in an extraordinarily literary household -- both of my parents were poets and college literature professors who started reading to me and discussing literature with me when I was quite young. I majored in English at Oberlin College and in 2006 completed an M.A. in Literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. After all that studying and worshipping of great literature, I'm finally ready to write my own and am doing so as I complete my M.F.A. at LSU, studying with James Wilcox, Rodger Kamenetz and Femi Euba.

I think I entertain myself as I write, and work out intellectual problems. I enjoy entertaining others as well, and being a part of writing communities in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I grew up and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I live now.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I adore Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. I also love the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, Lawrence Durrell, Simone de Beauvoir, and the work of Joyce, though I have yet to finish Ulysses. (online reading club anyone?) I love the stories of Chekhov and Flannery O' Connor. My favorite poets are Milton, Yeats, Shakespeare, Frost and Eliot. My favorite playwright is Tennessee Williams.