Biography
Called by The Bloomsbury Review, “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is the author of four books of poems, the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, One Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks (nominated by Ploughshares for the 2005 Zacharias Poetry Award as well as nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) published by Wings Press and Without the Comfort of Stars: New and Selected Poems (2007 Sampark Press, New Delhi and London). She is also the author of several chapbooks of poems. Future publications include Crazy Love, a collection of poems from Wings Press.
Uschuk’s work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including Spanish, Russian, Czech, Swedish, Albanian, and Korean. Her work has appeared in over two hundred fifty journals and anthologies worldwide, including Future Cycle, Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Calyx, Ploughshares, Pequod and O Taste and See. Pamela also writes and publishes nonfiction articles in such journals as Parabola, Terrain, and Inside/Outside.
Uschuk’s literary prizes include the the Struga International Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the 2001 Literature Award from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council for Finding Peaches in the Desert, and The King’s English Prize as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Iris, Ascent, Sandhills Review, and Amnesty International. Poems and articles have been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Czech, Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Korean and Russian.
She has been a featured writer at Prague Summer Workshops, the University of Pisa, International Poetry Festivals in Malmo Sweden and Struga, Macedonia, the British School in Pisa, Italy, Vilenica in Slovenia, the Prague Summer Workshops, Gemini Ink Writers Festival, the Meacham Writers Conference, the Book Marks Book Fair, the Scandinavian Book Fair, the Deep South Writers Conference, the Universities of Arizona, Montana, Gothenberg (Sweden), Oregon, Montana State, Colorado State and California State Universities, New York University, Juilliard, Hunter College, Vassar College, SUNY New Paltz, and numerous colleges and book stores.
Among the institutions where she has taught creative writing courses include Marist College, Pacific Lutheran University, Fort Lewis College, the University of Arizona’s Writing Works Center and Salem College. She also spent many years traveling to teach creative writing to Native American students on the Salish, Sioux, Assiniboine, Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Crow, Tohono O’odham and Yaqui reservations in Montana and Arizona. Pamela Uschuk has been the Director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, where she has also taught Creative Writing. Editor-In-Chief of the literary magazine, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk is a professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She makes her home outside of Bayfield, with the writer William Pitt Root, their two dogs, Happy and Zazu and the queen of cats, Sadie.
