Love should grow up like a wild Iris in the Fields, Rice, Summer Night

Introduction to Author

Susan Griffin is a poet, playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she expended as a child in the High Sierras and along the seaboard area of the Pacific sea also formed her awareness. As she sketches attachments between the decimation of environment, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the determinants of war to renunciation in both private and public life, her work moves after the boundaries of pattern and perception. She is renowned for her innovative style. Her groundbreaking publication Woman and Nature is an expanded prose-poem. AChorus of pebbles, the personal Life of War, combines history and memoir as does wrestling with Angel of Democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen her most latest book. This work explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains democracy.(Jack, pp.12-13)

Both books are part of a bigger series of several volumes, comprising "social autobiography."

AChorus of Stones, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the nationwide Book Critics Award, and victor of the BABRA Award in 1992, was also a NY Times Notable publication of the Year.

Her play Voices, which won an Emmy in 1975 for a localized PBS output, has been presented all through the world, encompassing a radio production by the BBC. The Book of the Courtesans, a Catalogue of Their Virtues, was published by Broadway publications (Random House) in 2001. Woman and environment, the classic work that motivated eco-feminism, was published in a new version by Sierra association publications in 2000. In 2009 she was bestowed a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

She has been the recipient of an NEA allocate, and a one year Macarthur Grant for calm and worldwide Cooperation. Her work, converted into 17 dialects, is taught in colleges and universities internationally. She has published some volumes of poetry. Unremembered homeland won the Commonwealth Club's Silver Medal for poetry in 1987. In 1998 Copper Canyon Press published angling Home, verses Selected and New 1967-1998, which was a finalist for the Western States Art Federation Award. Her play Voices won an Emmy for a local PBS output in 1975. Her more latest play, Thicket, performed in San Francisco by Ruth Zaporah, was published by The Kenyon Review. In supplement to employed as advisor for two other documentary films, she co-authored the script for the Academy Award nominated movie, Berkeley in the Sixties. She is actually composing a script depicting the life of a  courtesan. She has completed Canto, a play in poetry about the massacres of villagers in Salvador that will be set to melodies by the composer and instrumentalist Glenn Kotche in 2009, and she is co-editing an anthology deserving, Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, to be released by UC Press in 2011. She addresses broadly in the ...