Susan Wheeler (born July 16, 1955) is an educator and poet. She is professor emeritus at Princeton University. She has also taught at the University of Iowa, New York University, Rutgers University, Columbia University and The New School.
Wheeler was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Minnesota and throughout New England. She received a BA from Bennington College in 1977 and pursued graduate studies in art history at the University of Chicago between 1979 and 1981.
Wheeler was the first example of an Elliptical poet described by Stephanie Burt in her coinage of the term in 1998 and expanded upon in an eponymous essay in American Letters & Commentary. Her work is also referred to in Jed Rasula's Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry.
1978 Vermont Arts Council grant
1988 Roberts Foundation Prize for Poetry
1993 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
1994 Norma Farber First Book Award, Bag o' Diamonds
1994 Pushcart Prize, Bag o' Diamonds
1997 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
2000 Pushcart Prize, Bag o' Diamonds
2012 National Book Award for Poetry finalist, Meme
Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry series in these editions: 1988, 1991, 1993, 1996, 1998, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997, 2003, and 2005.
Bag 'o' Diamonds, University of Georgia Press, 1993
Source Codes, Salt Publishing, 2001
Ledger, University of Iowa Press, 2005
Assorted Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Meme, University of Iowa Press, 2012
Record Palace, Graywolf Press, 2005