Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and a former MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent book of poems is Cinder: New and Selected Poems, from Graywolf Press in 2017, and her most recent book of prose is The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture, from the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Her book of poems Columbarium won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2003. She is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Guggenheim and Berlin Prize fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.