Mario Susko, a witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia, came, so to speak, back to the US at the end of 1993. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook in the 70s and has lived, on and off, in this country half of the past thirty three years. He taught at the University of Sarajevo and Nassau Community College where he is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department. More recently his poems appeared in several British journals, "Dream Catcher," "The Interpreter's House," "magma poetry," "The Ugly Tree," and "erbacce;" also, in "Borderlands," "Wind," "Nassau Review," "The Progressive," "96Inc," "Branches Quarterly," "The Paumanok Review," and "Steam Ticket." He is the recipient of several awards, including the 1997 Nassau Review Poetry Award, the 1998 Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Letteratura "Nuove Lettere" (Naples, Italy), and the 2000 Tin Ujevic Award for "Versus Exsul" as the best book of poems published in Croatia in 1999. His poem from his new book, "Conversion," published and nominated by "Dream Catcher," was short-listed for the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize; also, "The Paumanok Review" nominated his poem "Session in Progress" (Summer 2004) for the 2005 Pushcart Prize, as did "The Inter- preter's House" the poem "Landless" for the 2005 Michael Donaghy Prize, managed by Forward, in the best single poem category. Mario Susko is also known as a prolific editor and translator, having translated work by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, E. L. Doctorow, Theodore Roethke, and e. e. cummings, among others. His recent work includes an integral edition/translation of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (Zagreb: Meandar, 2002) and his selected poems 1982-2002 "Reading Life and Death" (Zagreb: Meandar, 2003). He is the author of 23 volumes of poetry, his fourth book in English "Eternity on Hold" having been released May 2005 by Turtle Point Press.
Mario Susko
