Susannah B. Mintz
Susannah B. Mintz is a professor of English and former chair of the department at Skidmore College, where she has taught since 2002. Her internationally recognized scholarly work focuses on disability studies, poetry, early modern literature, the study of pain, and forms of life-writing, including autobiography, creative nonfiction, and graphic memoir. Her books have explored issues of pain and illness representation in literature, disability memoir, crime fiction and disabled detectives, and psychological dynamics in the work of John Milton. As a creative writer, she has published both prose poetry and personal essays, in work that ranges from highly fragmented lyrical essay to narrative-driven extended memoir. Her critical and creative work have been recognized for outstanding significance and she was granted Skidmore’s excellence in teaching award. She has an MFA from Columbia University and received her PhD from Rice University in Houston.
NEW WORK
Placing Disability: Personal Essays of Embodied Geography
Edited by Susannah B. Mintz and Gregory Fraser
Placing Disability presents an international collection of personal essays that address the experience of disability in particular geographical locations. Each chapter engages the question of what it means to be disabled in a specific place, exploring issues of movement, work and play, community and activism, artistic production, love and marriage, access and social services, family and friendship, memory and aging―all informed by the places that people inhabit. The book is organized in terms of topographies and vistas, rather than being bound by the map, to emphasize the defining, constitutive effects of place. The authors included in Placing Disability hail from different countries, neighborhoods, climates, and landscapes; from various backgrounds and professions; from a range of disciplinary perspectives and strategies. They are trained as academics, literary critics, poets, students, public speakers, memoirists, educators, philosophers, administrators, and activists. Their essays refine our understanding of the complex dynamic between self and circumstance as they survey the impact of geographical region on their life experiences. This book is intended to be useful in creative-writing workshops, Disability Studies seminars, and classes on environmental literature, and to appeal to general readers of memoir as well as to scholars of contemporary body theory or the Anthropocene.
Forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Disability Series in December 2023