Susan Terence

Susan Terence has won several awards for her writing, including a DeWar’s Young Writer’s Recognition Award for the State of California, the Audre Lord award for Fiction, Highsmith award for playwriting, San Francisco District 11 awards, and Ann Fields and Browning awards for dramatic narrative poetry. Her poetry has been published in Southern Poetry Review, Nebraska Review, Negative Capability, Lake Effect, Americas Review, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Halftones to Jubilee, St. Petersburg Review, and several other magazines and anthologies.
She received her B.A. in English Education with additional studies in Spanish and Creative Arts from the University of Arizona in Tucson; and her M.A. in Inter-Disciplinary Arts and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She has performed her work in bookstores, libraries, colleges, and theaters around the country, presenting oral theatrical interpretations of her poetry, dramatic monologues, and fiction. She has served as a writer and performing artist in residence through the California,  Montana, North Carolina, and Fulton County (Atlanta) Georgia Arts Councils and through Arts in Arizona Towns, on the Tohono O’odham Reservation outside Tucson, through Writer’s Voice, and throughout Northern California via California Poets in the Schools (CPITS.) She has served as San Francisco Area Coordinator of CPITS for over 30 years. She has written and been awarded over 50 grants (including grants from the San Francisco Giants) to lead poetry and performing arts workshops in San Francisco schools.
She’s been named Creative Writing Teacher of the year by the SF Unified School District.
She has also been a Poet in Residence at the De Young and Legion of Honor Museums in San Francisco, and led poetry, performance, and art workshops at the Exploratorium and poetry at the California Academy of Sciences. She has completed a novel set in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona. Her poetry, fiction, plays and monologues deal primarily with individuals in disenfranchised communities.