ABOUT
Leah Souffrant makes art, poetry, and criticism. Her work involves literature, visual art, performance, poetics, and translation, as well as feminist theory. Projects include a range of inquiries into the unsayable and the everyday — in theory, performance, visual art, poetry, and all stretches between; poetics of motherhood; investigations into representations of loss.
Her most recent book is Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body.
Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable was published in 2017. Souffrant’s Commentary series “A slowing: Poetics and attention” appears on Jacket2 in interlocking essayistic installments.
In 2020, her poetic manuscript was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Nina Fortin Dissertation Proposal Award by the Center for the Study of Women & Society. Souffrant was selected to be a Catwalk Institute Artist-in-Residence and has been recognized as a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellow in Poetry.
Souffrant is a co-founder of The LeAB Iteration Lab. The LeAB Iteration Lab is multi-disciplinary collaborative partnership co-created with Abby Paige, employing poetic tools such as repetition, silence, gesture, image, and movement to develop works of experimental performance.
““A slowing
Deciding to think is not the same as moving the mind to think differently. Language is limited, slippery. [...] What are the implications of turning our attention to writing that withholds, acknowledging the tenuous grasp language has on meaning? What is the value of a poetics of the unsayable?””
Souffrant studies looking, learning, and knowing in writing and visual studies, with an emphasis on aesthetics of silence. In poetry, essays, and art, Souffrant is committed to interdisciplinary work and research. She is currently working on a book enacting a lyric investigation of the entangled relationship between argument and oppression. Sample of her visual art can be found here.
““Peace is the absence of war, but it is also the presence of actively attentive ethics of pacifism. Those who take peace seriously understand this important tension. Peace is not simply carefree, but precisely a directing of care toward peace. In every work in Yoko Ono’s show, you the viewer have to care, attend, and interact.” ”
Dr. Souffrant holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a B.A. in Russian Literature from Vassar College. She studied briefly at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.
Since 2013, Souffrant has been faculty at New York University, where she has received the Teaching Award of Excellence and a Teaching Innovation Award. Souffrant teaches essay writing, Writing As Inquiry, Poetics of the Unsayable, Intersections: Writing for Scholarly Publics, and has served as a mentor of undergraduate Writing Tutors and on various department committees including Diversity & Inclusion and Curriculum & Assessment. She is a co-creator of a multi-year research initiative on contract grading and participant in the Inclusive Teaching Seminar and Difficult Dialogues Leadership Institute sponsored by NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion.
For nearly a decade, Souffrant taught at Baruch College - CUNY. She has also taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and St. John’s University. Her courses have been in areas including surveys of world literature, Great Works of Literature, topics in literature by women, surveys and topics in American Literature, poetry, aesthetics and trauma, composition and writing. She served as founding co-chair of the Poetics Group at the Graduate Center, CUNY, organizing interdisciplinary critical-creative events for the doctoral community and beyond.
Souffrant has worked in the field of grants administration at private family foundations and non-profit grantmaking institutions. She volunteers as a tutor for Adult Literacy in Brooklyn.