Susan Deer Cloud

Biography

Deer Cloud, born to Joseph R. Hauptfleisch and Dorothea Mae Lare in Livingston Manor, New York, grew up in the Borscht Belt. She received her B.A. in General Literature and Creative Writing (summa cum laude) and M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.

Work and achievements

Deer Cloud resides in the Catskill Mountains. She has taught Creative Writing at Binghamton University, ranging from introductory poetry and fiction courses to upper level poetry courses, as well as Composition at Broome Community College. She works as a full-time writer who gives poetry readings, talks and workshops at colleges and other venues. A member of the peace organization Servas International, she hosts travelers as well as travels to various places in America and abroad.

Deer Cloud's poems, fiction, and creative essays have appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including Comstock Review, About Place, Red Rock Review, Sin Fronteras, Naugatuck River Review, Mas Tequila Review, The Florida Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Yellow Medicine Review, Sentence, Exquisite Corpse, Rosebud, Identity Theory, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Earth’s Daughters, Shenandoah, Ms., Pembroke Magazine, Quarterly West, To Topos, Chiron Review, Croton Review, The Greensboro Review and winning writers. Her poems and stories have appeared in various anthologies, among them Poetry of Resistance, The Border Crossed Us, Mo' Joe Anthology, Adrienne Rich: a Tribute Anthology, Stone Soup Anthology, City of the Big Shoulders: an Anthology of Chicago Poetry, Hip Poetry; multicultural anthologies Unsettling America and Identity Lessons; and Native anthologies Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe, Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, and A Nation Within.

Deer Cloud is the recipient of two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Chenango County Council for the Arts Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature (Poetry). She has received Prairie Schooner’s Readers’ Choice Award and has twice been given First Prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition. She founded and hosted readings and performances with a group of writers, artists and musicians called Binghamton’s Underground Poets, Wild Indians & Exuberant Others, Unc. (Unincorporated), and edited a multicultural anthology Confluence containing work by Underground participants. She edited the Spring 2008 Issue of Yellow Medicine Review, a Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought. She is also editor of the ongoing Re-Matriation Series of Indigenous Poetry for FootHills Publishing.

It should be noted that previously she had work published under a former married name of Susan Clements.