Leah Souffrant

Leah Souffrant is the author of Entanglements and Plain Burned Things.

"Studying Entanglements entangles me in Souffrant’s open-hearted archive, and renews my faith in the poetics of bibliomancy”
— Wayne Koestenbaum 

“The force of Leah Souffrant’s roving, probing mind and the remarkable distances it both maps and collapses is exquisite.”
— Jenny Xie

Entanglements: threads woven from history, memory, and the body is available from Unbound Edition Press here (as well as at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore or library). Listen to a podcast interview about the book at Authors Unbound. Kirkus Reviews calls Entanglements “gorgeous.”

“Entanglements is a true “text” in the etymological traces of the word: both the act of weaving and the object woven.”
— Chris Campanioni

Souffrant's book Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable is available from the Collection Clinamen imprint in interdisciplinary poetics from les Presses Universitaires de Liège. 

"Leah Souffrant, with laudably quiet gestures, reaches lyrically into literature's silent places to delineate the thermodynamics of the lacuna. Working the pauses, she does a Duras: nimble, stunned, alert. Hats off to Souffrant for the elliptical beauty she unearths and — with interpretive deftness — performs!"
— Wayne Koestenbaum on Plain Burned Things

Read A More Visceral Sense of Language’s Limitations, Leah Souffrant’s discussion (with Liesl Schwabe) of creating art and poetry in Speak the Magazine.

Featured in the Studio Lab Showcase, “Thread: Riddle of the Physical” appears in Seisma Magazine, a journal dedicated to the intersection between science and art.

Leah Souffrant’s Afterword to In Praise of Fragments by Meena Alexander was published in 2020 by Nightboat Books.

In 2020, Souffrant’s The Same World was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

“To look so unflinchingly at the invisible web that holds everything together, to feel its umbilical tug on your own life, requires a form of courage that Souffrant has in spades and, with her writing, she’ll lend you some.”
— Abby Paige

“Simply put, [Entanglements] is a gorgeous book—and the reader will, too, become entangled in its brilliance and artistry and emerge changed. 
— Tyler Mills

ABOUT

Leah Souffrant makes art, poetry, and criticism. Her work involves literature, visual studies, performance, poetics, and translation, as well as feminist theory & aesthetics. 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.

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. 

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. Her most recent book is Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body. 

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.

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. 

POETIC & CRITICAL WRITING

Poetry and criticism by Souffrant can be found in literary journals, scholarly reviews, and print anthologies.

Selected Writing:

“A More Visceral Sense of Language’s Limitations,” conversation with Liesl Schwabe in Speak the Magazine.
“Thread: Riddle of the Physical” in Seisma Magazine’s Studio Lab Showcase
Review of migraré in Résonance 2022
Afterword to In Praise of Fragments by Meena Alexander, Nightboat Books 2020
"Reading Simone Weil" in Bone Bouquet
Louise Labé's Sonnet II in Interim, Vol. 34, Issue 3, from a series of poetic transcreations, from the French
”A Brief Meditation on Looking: Why Instagram” in Closed Eye Open.
“Haunting Is Recursive: A brief meditation on erasure and the case of Zong!” appears in L'effacement, a 2019 installment of  Formes poétiques contemporaines.
Review of the MoMA exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 in the Poetry Project Newsletter
“Mysterious Me: A Brief Meditation on Personae” in Poet Lore
'Like a postponed present': Reading reality in Mandelstam's 'Voronezh Notebooks' in Jacket2
“Look at the Wall: Reading the Unsayable in Duras and Carson” in Pennsylvania Literary Journal
“Mother Delivers Experiment: Poetry of Motherhood: Plath, Derricotte, Zucker, and Holbrook” in WSQ Women’s Studies Quarterly
"Not to Walk" in Poet Lore
A fierce intellectual pacifism: Riding's 'Contemporaries and Snobs' - an essay-review at Jacket2
“In Praise of Unknowing” at EOAGH
“A conception is a motion” in Far From the Centers of Ambition, Lorimer Press
“Long Short Talk on My Black Mountain, Which is Invisible” in Far From the Centers of Ambition, Lorimer Press
“Imperfect Plenty” in Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days, University of Iowa Press
“Lucrece in Translation: Analysis of Progressive Silence” in Anamesa Literary Journal
“Heard the unspoken words” in Tygerburning Literary Journal
“Language about language” in Tygerburning Literary Journal
“Untitled (or It was/By the water)” in the Burnside Review
“It’s only when I look at trees” in Memorious
Translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End,” from the Russian - unpublished
Additional works have appeared at Delirious Hem, Poet Lore, Poets & Writers online, Weber, and elsewhere. 

COLLABORATIVE & PERFORMANCE

Selected Collaborations and Performances:

The LeAb Iteration Lab presents A Reiteration in Progress
Reading at Callicoon Fine Arts for In Praise of Fragments
Artistic Consultant, Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Brazilian director Renato Rocha
Reading at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry
Staging of Sylvia Plath’s radio play “Three Women,” developed in collaboration with Karinne Keithley
Composition and performance of song series by Stefan Feingold, Swiss composer and classical guitarist
Performance and workshopping of Staging Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters
Work featured in Dome Poem NC by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn
Co-editor of Four Corners literary journal 2005-2007
Epistolary poetics with Canadian-based poet and performer Abby Paige
Souffrant’s artist book Essay for Elsa: somersaults exhibited in the A.I.R. Gallery, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Reading from “Entangled with texts: Poems” in Jane’s Reading List: Jane Marcus Feminist University, The Graduate Center, CUNY September 2016
Aesthetics and Ethics of Teaching Writing, New York University, October 2017

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, Poetics of the Unsayable, Intersections: Writing for Scholarly Publics, and has served as a mentor of undergraduate Writing Tutors and on the 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.

VISUAL

To see visual art by Leah Souffrant , please click here and follow on Instagram @mostly_leah. 

Leah Souffrant’s visual art has been exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Gowanus Creative Studios, and Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in Brooklyn.

CONTACT

To contact Leah Souffrant regarding her work, please email her here.