Susan McCabe (born in Los Angeles) is an American poet and scholar. She is currently a Professor of English at the University of Southern California.[1]
Susan McCabe received her Ph.D in Literature at UCLA. She has taught at the University of Oregon and Arizona State University. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature program at the University of Southern California.[2]
McCabe is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Descartes' Nightmare.
McCabe's first book, Elizabeth Bishop, Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State Press, 1994), was called by poet Donald Revell "the first book to present Bishop's poetry as a successful entirety, a coherent, humane, and progressive enterprise".
From 2005-2006 McCabe was the president of the Modernist Studies Association.[3] Focussing particularly on Modernist poetry, McCabe's most recent book of criticism is Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry & Film (Cambridge University, 2005), out in paperback in 2009.
Her critical literary biography H.D. and Bryher: A modernist love story was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
She has published many reviews, most recently on Brenda Hillman (Colorado Review), which followed a series of "eco-relations" reviews published by the Los Angeles Book Review in 2021 and 2022. She has written many articles on the topics of Hitchcock, Stein, and other 20th century figures or cultural movements.
Her first book of poems, Swirl (2003), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She won the Agha Shahid Ali Award for Descartes' Nightmare in 2007, selected by Cole Swensen, and published by Utalh University Press in 2008.