Creative

Work in progress

I’m writing a music-driven memoir, The Only Girl in the Record Store, about coming of age as a gothy, redheaded minister’s daughter in Colorado and NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, and finding the freedom to march to my own drum machine.

I also write poetry and poetic hybrid essays. My work in progress includes a prose-poem chapbook, Lavatoria: Dreams of Shame, that revisits scatalogical dreams, night-visions of toilets, and the emotion of shame, with the aim of purifying these images with sunlight and study.

Artist statement

I am a poet who writes primarily in prose and a logician who cares almost exclusively about subjective human experience. My work seeks to combine an immersive experience of emotion with an intellectual exploration of language, minimizing volume while maintaining language’s furred and floral possibilities—including narrative—and collating and juxtaposing elements of time and perspective. I write always through a feminist lens, although that lens contains flaws due to the erosions of generation, race, sexuality, culture, upbringing, faith and lack thereof, idealism, neuroatypicality, economic class, and aesthetic orientation. Central to the work is taking a jeweler’s loupe to the aberrations to examine myself, my lens, and my flaws—in other words, every work is a question.

Stay in the loop

Twitter thoughts @susannadonato

Images on Instagram

Publications

• • “Classified” in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press, October 2021)
  • “Via Negativa” in Redivider, May 2020
  • “Don’t Panic, I’m Only Autistic” in The Manifest-Station, April 2019
  • Three poems published in Indolent Books’ What Rough Beast series:
    • “Sessions (a playlist),” November 9, 2018
    • “Late Autumn, Family,” November 16, 2018
    • “Valentine’s Day,” November 23, 2018
  • “Appraisal” in Proximity Magazine, April 2017
  • “There is no main mixtape” in ENTROPY, April 2016
    • Blogged with the Spotify playlist at Auditory Memory
  • “Fast Food” published in Okey-Panky, February 2016, and simultaneously at Electric Literature
    • Afterward, Okey-Panky editor Alice Bolin asked me four questions 
  • “Tooth Fairy” in Blue Earth Review, Issue 15
  • “It Really Ain’t Me, Babe” in the anthology Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned From Pop Songs
  • “Still in Rotation: The The’s Soul Mining” at Midlife Mixtape, September 2014
  • “Separate Ways” published in Hippocampus, August 2012
  • Other writing published in Wazee Journal, Columbia, and Synergism

Honors

• • Awarded a four-week writing residency, Vermont Studio Center, February 2019
  • Invited reader, Unchaste Readers Front Range, Denver, May 2017
  • Shortlist, Disquiet International Prize (nonfiction), April 2017
  • Invited reader, Kudos Live (recently published writers), Lit Fest, Lighthouse Writers, Denver, June 2016
  • Invited reader, The Denver Heat, August 2014
  • Invited reader, The Draft 22.0 (Lighthouse Writers Workshop), May 2014
  • Finalist, Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction

Education & writing community

• • Survey volunteer, VIDA Count, 2017-2019
  • Graduate, Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project (2013-2015)
  • Tin House Summer Writers Workshop (nonfiction), studied under David Shields, July 2015
  • Attended NonfictioNOW 2015 (Flagstaff) and 2018 (Phoenix)
  • Lit Fest nonfiction workshop, studied under Robin Hemley, Lighthouse Writers, July 2014
  • Partner in The Writers Block, LLC, a Denver writing space (2010-2017)
  • Student and instructor, Lighthouse Writers Workshop (Denver)
  • Judge, Colorado Book Awards, 2011

(Occasionally updated) blog: