I’m Suzanne.
For me, writing, like yoga, is a technology for—an aid to—transformation. Liberation? So are improvisation, conversation, talk, collaboration. Skill is a variable. I make objects. Literary texts with conceptual dimension.
My poetry publications and performance documents include New Sutras, The Kim Game, TOUT VA BIEN, and Passenger Ship. Other texts in the live, performative, or conceptual vein include Three-Way, HOLE IN SPACE, and Orphée. Performance recordings are archived at PennSound, and some of them (will) live on this website also. With poet Steve Benson, I am the author of Do Your Own Damn Laundry, which documents the 36 improvisational dialogues we performed together between 2011 and 2012.
I have been a publisher, editor, and curator. I was the founding editor, and for eight years editor-in-chief, of Open Space, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s hybrid art and language platform and publication. I founded a chapbook press, TAXT, in 2005, to distribute the work of Bay Area writers and artists then under-represented in print. In the olden days, I was co-director and film curator of a little place called {four walls, in San Francisco.
I am of California. I was raised in LA and spent thirty anxious and productive years in the Bay Area. Now I live & work near my love, the airport, and the ocean, in San Diego.
Of late I’ve been writing in public again, at FLORENCE.
beginnings
los angeles / 1968
death of the father / 1981
india / 1987
san francisco / 1987
baja / 1988
earthquake / 1989
_______ / 1989
david / 1992
nyc / 1993
krakow / 1994
4walls / 1995
marriage / 1998
alcott series / 1999
mfa / 2000
paris / 2002
divorce / 2004
orphée / 2004
tout va bien / 2005
oakland / 2005
taxt / 2006
sfmoma / 2006
lwc/lwk / 2007
open space / 2008
hole in space / 2008
new sutras / 2008
dyodl / 2011
the kim game / 2012
mark / 2013
freelance / 2016
san diego / 2017
suzannestein.net / 2018
florence / 2023