Virginia Chase Sutton

Virginia Chase Sutton comes from a family of women writers. Her great-aunt Mary Ellen Chase, was a well-known author of fiction and non-fiction the mid-twentieth century where her books routinely appeared on best-seller lists. Her students at Smith College, where she taught for many years, included Sylvia Plath, Betty Freidan, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Sutton's grandmother, Virginia Lowell Chase, published three novels and a collection of essays. While neither one was a poet, as is Virginia...See more

Virginia Chase Sutton comes from a family of women writers. Her great-aunt Mary Ellen Chase, was a well-known author of fiction and non-fiction the mid-twentieth century where her books routinely appeared on best-seller lists. Her students at Smith College, where she taught for many years, included Sylvia Plath, Betty Freidan, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Sutton's grandmother, Virginia Lowell Chase, published three novels and a collection of essays. While neither one was a poet, as is Virginia Chase Sutton, they contributed greatly to her love of writing and proof that a woman could be a writer without barriers. Sutton's new chapbook, Down River, published by Finishing Line Press, is a deeply felt internal life of the speaker as a child and as an adult. Whether the speaker is witnessing family abuse---her own sexuality thwarted or her mother's alcoholism or her father's abusive temper---she attempts to remain in the "here and now," as her therapist many years later tells her to do. But she cannot. The ghosts of her past reoccur so frequently that she finds herself in several psychiatric hospitals, haunted by her past as well as her present. These poems also show some normalcy in time spent with grandparents who, true to their Midwestern roots, place the speaker and her sister in "Vacation Bible School," which they promptly ditch, not fitting into mornings of Bible study and hymns. They huddle in the basement as tornadoes rip the yard apart, power out, cowering on the stairs. But the damaged speaker also lives to escape into utopian fantasies and hides the spring and summer away beneath a thicket of flowering lilac bushes where she can hear the children who will not play with her, yet she can watch them because "I'm safe here, //enchanted." These poems are narratives with frightening stories of a family out control, of an abused child, and of the spirit that rises from mental illness into some kind of control. As poet Cynthia Huntington writes, "I would call this courage, yet it also feels like love. This is a beautiful book, richly imagined and deeply felt." Sutton earned her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and also holds an MA in Literature. Her undergraduate work was at Coe College (Cedar Rapids, IA) and Goddard College (Plainfield, VT). She also did a post-graduate semester and served as a writing workshop coordinator for two residencies for the Writing for Children program at Vermont College. Her second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was published by Northeastern/University Press of New England. Of a Transient Nature, her third book, was published last year (Knut House Press). Embellishments (Chatoyant) was her first. Her poems have won her the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, a Fellowship to Writers at Work, the Paumanock Visiting Writer's Award and Reading Series, first prize in the National Poet Hunt, both a finalist and semifinalist for the Dana Award in Poetry. a fellowship to Vermont Studio Center and a fellow many times at the Ragdale Foundation. Six times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Witness, Comstock Review, Quarterly West, Bellevue Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, MacGuffin, Tiferet, So to Speak, 13th Moon, Alimentum, Silver Birch Press, Redactions, The Beloit Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, National Forum, and many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. See less