TERESE SVOBODA, NOVELIST & POET

Terese Svoboda was born and raised in Nebraska. Her nine published books include fiction: Tin God (U of Nebraska Press, 2006), Trailer Girl and Other Stories, A Drink Called Paradise (Counterpoint Press), Cannibal (NYU Press); poetry: Mere Mortals (U of Georgia), Laughing Africa (U of Iowa), All Aberration (U of Georgia), Treason (Zoo Press); and translations: Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth (Greenfield Review Press). Her work has been selected for the Writer's Choice column in the NY Times Book Review, Great Lakes New Writers Award, an NEH grant in translation, VLS Best Summer Books, and one of SPIN's books of the year. She has taught at William and Mary, Williams College, San Francisco State, Sarah Lawrence, and University of Hawaii. In 2008, her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent will be published by Graywolf Press.

Cannibal won the Bobst Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association first fiction prize. Vogue called Cannibal "a woman's Heart of Darkness" and it was also chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by Spin. Her second novel, A Drink Called Paradise, one of Voice Literary Supplement's ten best reads of the summer, was partially based on her experience in the Cooks. Booklist called it "a stunning novel, frighteningly mysterious and complex." The New York Times called Trailer Girl and Other Stories, "a book of genuine grace and beauty." In this novel she returns—as most authors do, eventually—home, with a novella about a wild child who hides in a herd of cattle.

Svoboda's four collections of poems are written in both form and free verse, and explore the current dichotomy between lyric and language. Treason, her most recent book of poetry, concerns betrayal: child to parent, wife to husband, a nation to its people. Its poems have been published in Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Yale Review, The New Republic, Tin House, Field, The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares and others. Eleanor Wilner wrote of the collection: "Cool, wry surface: depth charge of cry, of outrage, language at the edge of utterance, utterly original, black-bordered, indelible as we are not." Her book of poems, Laughing Africa won the Iowa Prize in Poetry.

In addition, Svoboda has acted as producer for the Columbia Translation Series and the Voices and Visions series. She has produced poetry videos and documentaries that have aired on PBS, internationally, and have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. She curated "Between Word and Image" for the Museum of Modern Art. Her libretto for WET, a chamber opera for Death and five voices, premiered at Disney's RedCat performance space in L.A. in 2005. She also writes proposals for new technology. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

ABOUT Black Glasses Like Clark Kent (Graywolf)
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize,
Selected by Robert Polito

Video for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent

 “Delving into the past, in this wonderful, singularly wry memoir, turns up enough guilt to go around for everyone. And yet, such is the honesty, humor and literary skill of Terese Svoboda that she manages to turn this sad story into a triumph of compassion and insight.”—Phillip Lopate

 In 1946, Terese Svoboda’s uncle served as a military policeman in occupied Japan.  He was assigned to guard convicted fellow Americans—GIs gathered from all over the Pacific. "The captain called a meeting for all the MPs. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded. He said he was going to have to start executing the prisoners, the ones in the death cells." Svoboda's uncle remained a silent witness to the unqualified punishment of American prisoners, many of them African American. His closely guarded secret remained under wraps for decades.

 As a child Svoboda thought of her uncle as superman, with “black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps.” At nearly eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach—and tell war stories. With the news of Abu Ghraib, he fell into a terrible depression, and the tapes he sent Svoboda ended abruptly with his suicide. Svoboda launched her own investigation, traveling to Japan, digging through buried files at the National Archives, and contacting the few surviving vets who served with her uncle.

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent reveals how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and be buried by time and protocol.

Poets & Writers magazine podcast of Terese Svoboda reading from
Tin God.