Susan Griffin
Poet, Essayist, Playwright and Screenwriter
Susan Griffin was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she spent as a child in the High Sierras and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness. As she draws connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both private and public life, her work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception.
She is known for her innovative style. Her ground breaking book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War, blends history and memoir as does Wrestling with Angel of Democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen her most recent book (published by Trumpeter books in April, 2008.) This work explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains democracy.
Both books are part of a larger series of several volumes, comprising "social autobiography." A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award, and winner of the BABRA Award in 1992, was also a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. Her play Voices, which won an Emmy in 1975 for a local PBS production, has been performed throughout the world, including a radio production by the BBC. The Book of the Courtesans, a Catalogue of Their Virtues, was published by Broadway Books (Random House) in 2001. Woman and Nature, the classic work that inspired eco-feminism, was published in a new edition by Sierra Club Books in 2000. In 2009 she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Susan's latest publication, Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World (UC Press, Berkeley, 2011) is an inspired collection that offers a new paradigm for moving the world beyond violence as the first, and often only, response to violence. Through essays and poetry, prayers and mediations, Transforming Terror powerfully demonstrates that terrorist violence – defined here as any attack on unarmed civilians – can never be stopped by a return to the thinking that created it. A diverse array of contributors – writers, healers, spiritual and political leaders, scientists, and activists, including Desmond Tutu, Huston Smith, Riane Eisler, Daniel Ellsberg, Amos Oz, Fatema Mernissi, Fritjov Capra, George Lakoff, Mahmoud Darwish, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jack Kornfield – considers how we might transform the ideas, attitudes and policies that have prepared the ground for terrorist acts and bring true healing to the victims of this violence. Broadly encompassing both the Islamic and Western worlds, the book explores the nature of consciousness and offers a blueprint for change that makes peace possible. From unforgettable firsthand accounts of terrorism, the book draws us into awareness of our ecological and economic interdependence, the need for connectedness, and the innate human capacity for compassion.
Named by Utne reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium, she has been the recipient of an NEA grant, and a one year Macarthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. Her work, translated into 17 languages, is taught in colleges and universities internationally. She has published several volumes of poetry. Unremembered Country won the Commonwealth Club's Silver Medal for poetry in 1987. In 1998 Copper Canyon Press published Bending Home, Poems Selected and New 1967-1998, which was a finalist for the Western States Art Federation Award. Her play Voices won an Emmy for a local PBS production in 1975. Her more recent play, Thicket, performed in San Francisco by Ruth Zaporah, was published by The Kenyon Review. In addition to working as consultant for two other documentary films, she coauthored the script for the Academy Award nominated film, Berkeley in the Sixties.
She is currently writing a script depicting the life of a courtesan. She has completed Canto, a play in poetry about the massacres of villagers in Salvador that will be set to music by the composer and musician Glenn Kotche in 2009.
Susan Griffin lectures widely in the United States and abroad, and teaches occasional courses at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Pacifica Graduate School, as well as privately at her home in Berkeley.
Topics of her speeches include: Woman and Nature; Environmental Problems and Social Justice; New Paradigms for Understanding and Meeting the Challenge of Terrorism; Aphrodite's Legacy: A Secret Chapter of Women's History; The European Tradition of Courtesans; The Real Lives (life) of Democracy; Rape as a Consequence of Inequality; Nuclear Weapons: Hidden Histories; Civilian Casualties: The New Frontline; Compassion and Connection, a Path to Self-integration; The Tree of Brilliant Fruit: How Art Awakens the Spirit; and The Ecology of Creative Writing.
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