Discipline: Literature – poetry

Susan Sindall

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Shady, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1987, 1989

Susan Sindall's life in poetry was preceded by years of activity in another art. After graduating from the Dance Division of the Juilliard School of Music in 1960, she went home to Cambridge, MA for the summer and started teaching modern dance in the gym of her old high school. She continued teaching dance at Manhattanville College, SUNY New Paltz, The Lincoln Center Institute, and the Laban Institute of Movement Studies, which she had co-founded, but in 1985 she retired to concentrate on writing. Her poems were slowly appearing in journals. She was again teaching children--this time as a poet in the schools. She won residencies at colonies. After two summer workshops with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Susan Sindall entered the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and earned her M.F.A. in 2003. The intellectual energy, stringent demands, and support of that program continue to nourish her poems.

Studios

Veltin

Susan Sindall worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

Learn more