Savannah Schroll Guz

Savannah Schroll Guz is an American fiction writer, art critic, and mixed-media artist. She is author of the politically conscious fiction anthology American Soma.

Contents

• Personal life
• Fiction Works
• References

Born in York, Pennsylvania in 1974, she is the daughter of Marvin and Carol Schroll. She attended Juniata College, graduating summa cum laude in 1997. She then went on to study German Expressionism as a Fulbright Scholar in 1997–1998 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, Germany. Here, she worked at the Neue Pinakothek for Alte Pinakothek Curator Dr. Konrad Renger, specialist in 17th-century Flemish painting. She also served as a correspondence translator for both General Director Dr. Johann Georg, Prince von Hohenzollern and for the Bavarian National Museum. She returned to the United States in July 1998 to study at the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a master's degree in art history in 2000.

Guz began writing fiction in 2000, while working in public affairs at the [Smithsonian Institution]. By 2004, she released her first collection of short stories, The Famous & The Anonymous (Better Non Sequitur), and by 2005, she edited the theme-based fiction anthology, Consumed: Women on Excess (So New Publishing). In 2004, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a storySouth Million Writers Award.

Of Guz's collection American Soma, author and Chicago Public Radio Contributor Charles Blackstone wrote:

"American Soma is a paragon of modern fiction and a rare glimpse at its future. Savannah Schroll Guz’s trenchant wit and uncompromising candor fuel every sentence, propelling these stories with revitalizing, visceral language that is not just evocative in the contextual reading moment, but transcends the limits of the page, by virtue of its abounding strength. Quirky, yet accessible short fiction that’s at once serious and hilarious, raw and refined, American Soma is a provocative collection I know we’ll be talking about for a long time to come."

Guz has been a reference reviewer for Library Journal and an art critic for American Craft, Sculpture Magazine, and Pittsburgh City Paper. Her essays, reviews, and cultural criticism appear in ZMag, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Modernism/Modernity Popmatters.com, and DRAFT.