San Francisco Poet Susan Terence
On Thursday, August 15, at 7:30pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature SF Poet Susie Terence. The reading will take place at the Arena Market cafe and will begin with live improv jazz and an open mic with jazz improv; the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
Susan Terence has won several awards for her writing, including a DeWar’s Young Writer’s Recognition Award for the State of California, the Audre Lord award for Fiction, Highsmith award for playwriting, San Francisco District 11 awards, and Ann Fields and Browning awards for dramatic narrative poetry. Her poetry has been published in Southern Poetry Review, Nebraska Review, Negative Capability, Lake Effect, Americas Review, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Halftones to Jubilee, St. Petersburg Review, and several other magazines and anthologies.
Terence received her B.A. in English Education with additional studies in Spanish and Creative Arts from the University of Arizona in Tucson; and her M.A. in Inter-Disciplinary Arts and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She has performed her work in bookstores, libraries, colleges, and theaters around the country, presenting oral theatrical interpretations of her poetry, dramatic monologues, and fiction. She has served as a writer and performing artist in residence through the California, Montana, North Carolina, and Fulton County (Atlanta) Georgia Arts Councils and through Arts in Arizona Towns, on the Tohono O’odham Reservation outside Tucson, through Writer’s Voice, and throughout Northern California via California Poets in the Schools (CPITS.) She has served as San Francisco Area Coordinator of CPITS for over 25 years.
Susan Terence has written and been awarded over 50 grants (including grants from the San Francisco Giants) to lead poetry and performing arts workshops in San Francisco schools. She has led poetry workshops for adults and students on the topics of: labor history; family oral history; Chinese Immigration History in California; Women’s history; baseball history; social justice and environmental issues; geology; Lorca and Neruda; and world folktales. She’s been named Creative Writing Teacher of the year by the SF Unified School District. She has also been a Poet in Residence at the De Young and Legion of Honor Museums in San Francisco, and led poetry, performance, and art workshops at the Exploratorium and poetry at the California Academy of Sciences. This past spring her high school students' poetry/visual art projects were displayed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. She frequently combines movement and music in her teaching and performances.
She has also been a puppeteer and worked on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Southern Arizona to train tribal workers in theater and puppetry skills, and also served as a magician’s assistant. She also toured around the country with a Berkeley satirical theater group, “The Plutonium Players.” She has worked as a community organizer setting up community gardens. She has completed a novel set in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona that deals with deportation and gentrification in a much loved barrio neighborhood. Her poetry, fiction, plays and monologues deal primarily with individuals in disenfranchised communities and are both wry and searing.
Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
