susanna schantz

occasionally

writes a poem, blocking blues in

narrow-banded green

About

Advance praise for SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE, the recipient of the 2026 Juniper Literary Prize for debut collection (University of Massachusetts Press, 2027):

"In SIGN BROKEN, MESSAGE INSIDE, Susanna Schantz turns roadside piety into lyric laboratory. Taking church marquee slogans as prompts, she cracks open declarative certainty to reveal doubt, pun, fracture, and unheard melodies. These poems reroute rather than rebut: cliché bursts into critique; homily morphs into homonym; rhetoric stutters, moral signage flickers in semiotic weather, and the sacred returns to dissembling fields of interpretation." --Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy Turvy

Susanna Schantz's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Common, Abridged Magazine, dadakuku, Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, La Piccioletta Barca, coastlines review: a journal of docupoetics, PHIL LIT, Sein und Werden, Syncopation Literary Journal, The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Humanist, Caveat Lector, The Sunlight Press, Deceleration, Jerry Jazz Musician, VAN Magazine, and Wildfire Words Ukraine Anthology 2026, and her poem "Breath Taking" was a runner-up in the After the End Poetry Competition 2025. She is a former teacher for New York City schools for pregnant, parenting and unhoused teens, and for young men in the justice system, U.S. Department of Education TRIO programs, and the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, with degrees from Yale and Columbia Universities. A trained naturalist, she lives in South Carolina and tries to keep her chronic neurological pain from ruining the day.