Susan Sanders

Photo courtesy of the author.

Susan Sanders grew up in Cabot, Vermont and earned two college degrees as a single mother. She started writing poetry and short stories at age thirteen. Her first influences were Louise Glück, Anne Sexton, Kenneth Koch, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. She studied poetry with Neil Shepard during her days at Johnson State College. She also worked with Tony Whedon as an assistant editor for Green Mountains Review and gained an appreciation for a wide array of styles, themes and subject matter in both poetry and fiction.

She moved after after earning her BA in Liberal Arts and spent time in Tucson, Arizona where she was accepted to Northern Arizona University on a full scholarship. She studied poetry with Barbara Anderson and the late Jim Simmerman. These two poets provided encouragement and inspiration. She experimented with more avant-garde styles and broadened her scope of what a poem could be. She worked as an assistant editor on the university's literary magazine, Thin Air.

After earning her master’s degree she traveled to forty-five of the lower forty-eight states and read poetry in Minot, North Dakota, Superior, Wisconsin and Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She returned to Vermont to be closer to her family after 9/11. She worked as a bookstore clerk, waitress, prep cook, secretary, and college writing instructor at Lyndon State College. She juggled two jobs for six years as a GED teacher and college writing instructor. She has published over fifty poems in the US and the UK. She also was nominated for a Teaching Excellence Award from the Community College of Vermont in 2024, 2021, 2019, and 2016. She published a collection of poetry with her late daughter titled Behind These Hills in 2017. She currently teaches writing classes at Norwich University and the Community College of Vermont.