Susan Straight
A Rising Force in the Literary World
When she was eight years old, Susan Straight clambered up the UCR Carillon Tower so far that campus police had to get her down. No force, however, has been able to stop the Riverside native from rising in the literary world.
Her novels, including I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, Highwire Moon and A Million Nightingales -- have been enthusiastically received by critics and readers alike. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship; the California Book Prize; a Pushcart Prize; the O. Henry Prize and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.
Straight, the mother of three girls and a full professor at UC Riverside, is one of the stars at the campus of the University of California system offering an undergraduate major in creative writing. "It's a magnet for the best writers," said Straight, who has helped organize UCR's Writer's Week -- which draws acclaimed writers from all over the world to read their work.
Straight writes lyrically and convincingly about life in Southern California. She appreciates California's racial diversity, producing students in her small seminars and workshops who are just as likely to be from an East LA barrio as "Japanese Surfer-dudes." Her work, and the work produced by her colleagues and her students, allow people to see into the complicated inner life of California.
Read more about Straight's earning the Lannan Literary Award
