Award Winning Author & Poet
Susan J.
Wurtzburg
Susan J. Wurtzburg was born in Toronto, Canada, although sadly she did not play on a hockey team when younger. However, she did enjoy skating on Rice Lake with her cousins, and sometimes her more skilled relatives would flick a puck back and forth with her.
Susan lived in Toronto, Montreal, and London, UK as a child, and eventually attended Trent University, Peterborough for her undergraduate Anthropology degree. Later, she received an M.A., and Ph.D. (Anthropology) from the University at Albany, SUNY, completing fieldwork at the archaeological site of Sayil, Yucatan, Mexico.
Over the years, she taught in New Zealand, and in the US (Hawaii, Louisiana, and Utah), where she encountered some fantastic students. Susan also ran an editing company in Hawaii, named Sandy Dog Books, and yes, over the years, she had a lovely pack of rescue dogs, along with one purebred giant lab.
While poetry had always been an interest, and she wrote many angst-filled poems as a teenager, she wasn’t able to put much effort into personal writing until after retirement.
Currently, she serves as an Associate Poetry Editor with Poets Reading the News (and encourages people to examine the online journal), and enjoys working on her own creative endeavors.
Susan enjoys collaboration, and did so in academia, while running her editorial business, and with her poetry. She worked with Dr. Richard Tan (Problem Gambling: New Zealand Perspectives on Treatment, 2004), Gabriel M. Brady (Wake Island—New Insights into the Past. The Story of Rear Admiral Winfield Scott Cunningham’s Struggle for Justice, 2022), and Lisa Lucas (Ravenous Words, 2025).
Poetry
Sliding over the Edge
By: Susan J. Wurtzburg
The Yokohama coast where railway tracks hold the land
close to the seashore like a giant zipper.
Wooden sleepers stretch north to Kaena Point,
an albatross sanctuary on Oahu’s rocky tip.
A promontory across the ocean, and many mountain ranges
from my father, lost to geography.
The landscape impinges on his daylight hours:
four white walls, a wheel chair, and a door.
No entrance to the world. He has exited his mind,
and left his body, an empty shell.
This dry husk of a man, confined to a bed, no walking,
but occasional gliding, nurse powered.
Motionless, but for a flapping arm, almost like a wing
practicing flight, skin transforms to feathers.
Plumes of hair upright, but inside an old sea bird preparing
to launch from his wheeled chariot.
Rounding skyward, an avian intervention giving sanctuary
as his mind slides over the edge of reality.
Spending his final years airborne at sea, an escape,
beloved birds, final companions for his voyage.
Published in Love in the Time of Covid: A Chronicle of a Pandemic, June 1, 2021.
Republished in Sanctuary Magazine, March, 2022.
Blue Skies Beckon
By: Susan J. Wurtzburg
Prominent tufted ears, black pupiled golden eyes, hooked powerful beak,
tree-bark camouflaged feathers, six-foot wingspan, predatory perfection
encased in the body of a 14-year-old Eurasian Eagle Owl. Let loose in New York’s
glass-walled metropolis. Urban zone of sand, stone, cement; natural materials
in unnatural form. Was there space for a bird hatched unnaturally, released
in Central Park by anonymous snipping of his cage wire? No skills
at wild living, yet he survived, dining well on mice. Named Flaco
by his fans, photographed during daytime hunting, perching, posturing,
on trees, but also building ledges, fences, created edges
delineating a once-natural world. Parceled patches of green, no barrier
to a renowned city resident, paparazzi-worthy. With only a year of fame
outside his cage, one cool morning in February, he strained the borders
of his world, flexing his wings into a window promising endless blue skies.
Published in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Encore 2024 Prize Poems, ed. Kathy Cotton, p. 56 (1st place in the “Land of Enchantment Award,” National Federation of State Poetry Societies).
Republished in Sanctuary Magazine, September, 2024.
Books
