Susan Schmidt
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’73)
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’72, ’80) has published Drought Drought Torrential, a book of poetry that captures a naturalist’s view of the first year of the pandemic in Beaufort, N.C. A scientist, poet, sailboat captain, and Quaker naturalist, Schmidt celebrates neighbors in her small town —dolphins, clouds, egrets, terns, willets, black skimmers, oystercatchers, herons, gannets. She witnesses coastal diversity and resilience, threatened by sea level rise, King Tides, motorboat wakes, and tourist trash. As a developmental editor, Schmidt polishes science and history books, novels, and memoirs. She has been a professor of literature and environmental decision-making, government science-policy analyst, and just renewed her Coast Guard Captain’s license, which she’s had forty years.
Her poems appear in Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina and won the Guy Owen, Gail O’Day, and Robert Golden poetry prizes; two poems were finalists for the James Applewhite Prize. She wrote Landfall Along the Chesapeake, In the Wake of Captain John Smith, an ecological history and boat adventure; Song of Moving Water, a novel about a young woman who organizes her community to oppose a dam; Salt Runs in My Blood, poems about fish, birds, playing in boats, walking long trails; Let Go or Hold Fast, Beaufort Poems about coastal critters, sea level rise, hurricanes, and tourist trash.
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’73)
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’72, ’80) will publish her book, Let Go or Hold Fast, Beaufort Poems (Library Partners), this fall. Her poems celebrate shorebirds and mourn their decline. Schmidt works as a developmental editor, revising books for publication. This is her fourth book. Learn more about her here.
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’73)
Susan Schmidt (Grad ’73) published a coming-of-age novel, Song of Moving Water, set in 1970s Virginia. The book tests whether new environmental laws can save a river from a proposed dam. She also published a new collection of poems, Salt Runs in My Blood, which tells her personal journey: she recalls bright parrots, big trout, sea gales, Celtic ancestry, old loves, traveling the world, learning to navigate and more. Ms. Schmidt currently works as a book editor, but previously worked as a science policy analyst, sailboat captain and professor of literature and environmental decision-making.