Suzanne Lummis is a poet, poetry educator/instigator, and co-founder and present director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Suzanne completed her M.A. in English/Creative Writing at Fresno State University where she studied with Philip Levine

Philip Levine (poet)

Philip Levine is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well...

. Since 1991, she has taught poetry at the UCLA Extension, including a course she developed “Poetry and the Movies: The Poem Noir.” Suzanne's seminal work comingling poetry and film noir

Film noir

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 has helped to define the poem noir motif—an edgy style that achieves a fusion of urban grit and urbane wit—causing fellow poet Mike Sonksen (aka Mike the Poet) to dub her "a poetic Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...

." In fall of 2011 she was an instrumental creative force behind the citywide, multi-arts series "Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film."

She is the granddaughter of Charles Fletcher Lummis

Charles Fletcher Lummis

Charles Fletcher Lummis was a United States journalist and Indian activist; he is also acclaimed as a historian, photographer, poet and librarian....

.

Career

Suzanne Lummis lives in Northeast Los Angeles and is an award-winning teacher at UCLA Extension where, since 1991, she has led the beginning through master class workshops in poetry. She is the present director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, which produces poetry events in Los Angeles and its environs. She combines her background in poetry writing and theater by performing with the language-driven troupe Nearly Fatal Women. This group, which she helped to found, has appeared at The Knitting Factory in New York, Knox College in Illinois, Beyond Baroque and MOCA

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...

in Los Angeles, and various other performance venues.

Suzanne edits the online literary magazine Speechless the Magazine, which is published by Tebot Bach. This eclectic journal of "poetry and related arts straight from L.A." has published issues covering topics such as "L.A. Poetry: Then and Now", "Poetry Goes to the Fights", and more recently "Speechless Goes to the Movies," which chronicles poets' impassioned love affair with the movies. If you've ever wondered what Allen Ginsberg's favorite movies were, be sure to check out "Poets' Favorite Movies Revealed at Last" in this issue.

Suzanne is the literary coordinator of the Arroyo Arts Collective in Northeast Los Angeles. From 1995 until 2003, the Arroyo Arts Collective sponsored five "Poetry in the Windows" competitions in Highland Park. During those events, poems appeared in store windows that included a pet shop, barber shop, drug store, laundermat, and bakery. Since 2006, the Arroyo Arts Collective has sponsored the annual "Lummis Day" for which Suzanne hosts the poetry festivities honoring her grandfather and celebrating the spirit and diverse culture of Northeast Los Angeles.

As visiting poet-professor, Suzanne has mentored seven-to-thirteen-year-old emerging poets at the Santa Fe Springs Art and Poetry Camp at Heritage Park and The Clarke Estate, co-sponsored by Friends of the Junior Arts Center. Her poetry and theater skills were applied in the summer of 2002 when she wrote the lyrics for a children's musical production of Twelfth Night produced in Beverly Hills and La Jolla by the ETC Theater Company. Her own two plays, October 22, 4004 B.C., Saturday and Night Owls, were produced in Washington State and Houston, Texas, as well at The Cast Theater, Los Angeles.

Awards and recognition

In 1996, Suzanne was awarded the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing. The late Drama-Logue honored two of her Los Angeles productions with playwriting awards. She was the recipient of a Rockefeller Grant for playwriting. Twice, the Poetry Society of America has selected Suzanne's poems to be displayed on public transportation in their Poetry in Motion Project. In 2006, WriteGirl awarded Suzanne their Bold Ink Award, which honors the voices of fearless women writers. Suzanne is included in the new five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (2005). In February 2008, a tribute was held in honor of Suzanne at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice Beach, CA. In response to this tribute is was said, “If L.A. has anything like a poetry ‘community’ these days, I think it is in large part owing to the presence of Suzanne Lummis—one of L.A.'s major poetic voices, a highly influential teacher, keeper of the dark flame of L.A. noir, and one of the leading graduates of the historically important Fresno poetry scene. May she thrive, and may L.A. poetry thrive with her.”—B.H. Fairchild.

In 2009 she was among the 45 writers selected by the National Endowment for the Arts to represent literary Los Angeles at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which last year explored the history and arts of Los Angeles.

Selected poems

• "Everywhere I Go There I Am"
• "Hurrying Toward the Present"
• "Medusa Depressed"

  This poem made its debut in England in the literary magazine Agenda and was later reprinted in the arts and culture magazine of the national English newspaper The Independent.

• "Take That Chance You've Been Considering"
• "The Perfect Man"
• "My Worst Poem"

Quotes

“That way of noticing the oddness or loveliness or some particularity in the commonplace . . . this is something that contemporary poetry's pretty good at. Come to think of it, it may be the outstanding quality of the poetry of our times, the way many of today's best poems insist that we look again at these seemingly ordinary, even lowly, things, objects of bland domesticity, brutish creatures and insects, scuffed street corners . . . Whatever once seemed too low for the subject of poetry can now be the subject of poetry.”

-- BiblioBuffet .

And:

"What poetry tries to do is bear the harsh and luminous world into language".

-- Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2001, in the article "Measuring Word's Worth"

Interviews

AmbushArts—Issue #3, Spring 2009

Suzanne Lummis Interview

Ever wonder why the sky is blue?--read "Answers and Four Common Questions."


BiblioBuffet—Talking Across the Table

Suzanne Lummis: An Interview

Suzanne explains why there are no bad poems about cockroaches.

External links

• AmbushArts
• Speechless the Magazine
• Nearly Fatal Women
• New Angeles Monthly
• Poetry Flash, Summer/Fall 2005, includes Suzanne's essay/review discussing the anthology Perfect in their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali
• Poetry Flash, Summer/Fall 2003, interview of Suzanne Lummis by Beth Houston, Poet of a World In Danger.
• Poetry.LA, Videos featured on Poetry.LA: Suzanne Lummis in conversation; Suzanne reads from her work at the Valley Contemporary Poets Reading Series, Tarzana, CA, January 2010.