About
Susan is a poet, writer, and editor from the southern Adirondacks of New York State. She worked in higher ed for 27 years, advising students and later teaching poetry and writing. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals around the country, and her book, Breathing Lessons, is forthcoming from Shanti Arts press in Maine. She edits individual poems and manuscripts of other writers and is available as a mentor and advisor for new poets.
Susan also facilitates writing workshops as well as poetry experiences for groups of people where she uses poetry as a way to explore life, nature, and what we find that enlivens us from within, making us a little more whole.
There is a quiet certainty in Susan’s poetry that reminds me of some of my favorite writers, especially Mary Oliver and Lucille Clifton. It is easy to be in her gently meditative poems, not just as a reader but a fellow observer. The natural world is more than just a setting, or a backdrop, but a felt presence. Breathing Lessons is a book to experience as much as read. You’ll savor the journeys on which it takes you.
--Joseph Bruchac, author of VOICES OF THE PEOPLE, a collection of biographical poems about notable Native people, with original full color art.
These wise, musical poems with their skillful rhymes and chanting repetitions, offer a wonderful lesson in mindful meditation: embodying mono-no-a-wabi in their appreciation and acceptance that everything is ephemeral. The speaker breathes symbiotically with everything present, finding solace from “the loneliness of a body leaving,” in the “Breath of being, breath of becoming,” in joy that asks us to “Come dance until you can’t./ Dance despite winter, despots, greed, /and losses you never imagined,” in joy as our birthright.
--April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries
“I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my editor, Susan Jefts, for her thoughtful reading, commentary, and edits……A gifted poet in her own right, she has helped me shape my book’s musings on relationships and physics into, hopefully, an eloquent whole. She has helped bring my poetry into a symphonic whole, always mindful of the reader’s sensibility and grasp.”
— Jack Mayer, author of Poems from the Wilderness and Entanglements: Physics, Love, and Wilderness Dreams and the prose books Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project and Before the Courts of Heaven
For more testimonials, go here.