Susanne Antonetta is the pen name of Suzanne Paola (born September 29, 1956, in Georgia), [1] an American poet and author who is most widely known for her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. In 2001, Body Toxic was named by the New York Times as a "Notable Book". An excerpt of "Body Toxic" was published as a stand-alone essay which was recognized as a "Notable Essay" in the 1998 Best American Essays 1998 anthology. She has published several prize-winning collections of poems, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize in Poetry winner, and the poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and most recently The Lives of The Saints. She currently resides in Washington with her husband and adopted son. She is widely published both in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post , as well as in literary journals including Orion, Brevity, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Seneca Review, and Image . She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Bellingham Review .
Paola was raised among the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which she later used as the setting for Body Toxic, in one of the most environmentally contaminated counties in the United States. Paola's memoir merges her personal and familial sagas with historical accounts, politics, and environmentalism.
Paola writes about how the poisoned landscape of her New Jersey childhood devastated her body, causing cardiac arrhythmia, seizures, severe allergies, and sterility. She recounts the story of the Radium Girls, details aspects of the frequent nuclear and industrial waste debacles in New Jersey, and relates these events to her family and neighbors.
Paola's memoir disputes attribution of her afflictions to genetic vulnerability, random chance, or recreational drug use. Vignettes depicting colossal man-made environmental disasters are woven into her story, accenting the recurrent medical catastrophes she endured, including endometriosis, rampant thyroid tumors, a quadruplet pregnancy (without fertility drugs) that ended in miscarriage, numerous growths on her liver and ovarian cysts that necessarily had to be removed, alongside repeated bouts of manic-depression. The latter condition was treated with psychotropic drugs, some of which are derived from the very same dye chemicals dumped, sometimes recklessly, into the environment of southern New Jersey.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn is a Canadian poet, ethnographer, and essayist. Born and raised on the Prairies, she moved to Nova Scotia in 1983. Neilsen Glenn is the author and editor of several books of creative nonfiction, poetry, literacy, ethnography, and essays. Her award-winning writing focuses on women, arts-based research, and memoir/life stories; her work is known for its hybrid and lyrical approaches. She has published book reviews in national and international journals and newspapers.
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry is a major United States literary award for a book of poetry chosen from an open competition.
Lori Jakiela is an American author of memoirs and poetry. She won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for non-fiction for her third memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe, in 2016.
Maggie Nelson is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
Kristen Iversen is an American writer of nonfiction and fiction. Her books include Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, as well as the anthologies Don't Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen and Doom with a View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. She is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and Literary Nonfiction Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Iversen was chosen to be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2020-2021.
Laura M. McCullough is an American poet and writer living in the state of New Jersey. McCullough is the author of seven published collections and is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. She was a finalist for the 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cheryl Pallant is a poet, author, dancer, healer, and professor who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She has published several books of innovative poetry, nonfiction, and has been featured in several anthologies. Her background as a writer and dancer has led to frequently merging these disciplines.
Jennifer Boyden is an American poet and teacher.
Renée Ashley is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and educator.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.
Devon Jean Moore is an American poet and author.
Greg Wrenn is an American writer from Jacksonville, Florida. He lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he is an associate professor of English at James Madison University. He was educated at Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis. From 2010-2016 he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University (ISU), she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019. In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Lacy M. Johnson is an American writer, professor and activist. She is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir, The Other Side: A Memoir and The Reckonings: Essays.
Alison Stine is an American poet and author whose first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paris Review, and Tin House.
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