Literature- Poetry
Chaska, MN
July 2000, September 2009, October 2016
More at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joyce-sutphen
Born in 1949, Joyce Sutphen was raised on a farm in rural Minnesota. Sutphen served as the second Minnesota State Poet Laureate from 2011-2021, and now works as an English Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her first collection of poems, Straight Out of View (1995), won the Barnard Women’s Poets Prize. Subsequent collections include Coming Back to the Body (2000), a Minnesota Book Award finalist, Naming the Stars (2004), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, First Words (2010), and Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems (2019). She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.
Sutphen’s work was popularized by its reading on Prairie Home Companion and continues to receive awards for excellence.