Susan Cheever and Michael Dumanis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Susan Cheever and Michael Dumanis will read as part of the Writers Reading Series. 

Susan Cheever’s most recent book Drinking in America, a look at American History through the lens of alcoholism, was published in October 2016. Her most recent biography, E.E. Cummings: A Poet's Life, was published in February 2014. Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, was published in the fall of 2010 and a previous book on the American transcendentalists, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work was published in 2006. She has published seven other books of nonfiction and  five novels. Her short work has appeared in dozens of publications and anthologies including The New Yorker and The New York Times, and as a weekly column in Newsday where she contributed to coverage that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 after the crash of TWA Flight 800. She has been nominated for a National Book Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship medal and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the Authors Guild Council and the board of the Yaddo Corporation. Cheever took a BA from Brown and has taught at Yale, Brown University, The New School, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.  

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and coeditor (with poet Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His poems have appeared in journals such as American Letters and Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Verse. His writing has been recognized with residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy; a 2012 Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture; fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference; and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.