Susan Eisenberg

Susan Eisenberg is a poet, visual artist, and oral historian who works within and across genres. Her work re-imagines the everyday, playing with scale and juxtaposition to investigate issues of power and social policy. Her poetry books include Stanley’s Girl (2018), Perpetual Care (2016), Blind Spot (2006), Pioneering (1998), and It’s a Good Thing I’m Not Macho (1984). Her poems have been widely anthologized. Introduced to the craft of poetry by Denise Levertov, her essay about that mentorship is included in Denise Levertov: In Company (2018). She entered the construction industry in 1978 at the start of federal affirmative action, and worked fifteen years on Boston-area construction sites. Among the first women in the country to become a licensed, journey-level electrician in the IBEW, she has framed the issues of tradeswomen for four decades, addressing audiences at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. In 1991, she began interviewing other tradeswomen pioneers from across the U.S. to understand from their stories the discrepancy between policy goals and outcomes, particularly why women remain less than 3% of the construction workforce. These interviews became the basis for We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction a 1998 New York Times Notable Book, re-issued in 2018 With a New Preface that frames the issues of workplace equity in the present-day. Her 900-square-foot touring mixed-media art installation, On Equal Terms, is being turned into an online exhibition. A Resident Artist/Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, she was the 2016-2017 Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, and an MFA in Poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she is a longtime resident of the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Author website: http://susaneisenberg.com/