About the Author

Geertje Suhr grew up in Northern Germany, studied German, Romance Philology, and History in Tübingen, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Lausanne (Switzerland). She received her doctorate in 1980 from the University of Illinois in Urbana with a dissertation on the poetry of Heinrich Heine.

Geertje Suhr is a member of the PEN-Zentrum deutsch-sprachiger Autoren im Ausland and the Varnhagen Society. In 2006, she endowed the Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize for Prose in German, awarded by the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German; to date, Nina Holz, Fred Viebahn, Peter Wortsman, Peter Blickle, Guy Stern, and Utz Rachowski have received the prize.

Dr. Suhr received the 2000 Elisabeth Fraser de Bussy Prose Prize from the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. She received the Robert L. Kahn Poetry Prize 2013 from the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. In 2020 she was named the Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry Laureate in Wuppertal, Germany. She lives in Chicago and Germany.