Joyce Sutphen's first book of poetry, Straight Out of View, won the Barnard New Women's Poets Prize Press,1995). Her second book of poems, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and her third book, Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press, 2004), won the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. In 2019 the University of Nebraska Press published Carrying Water to the Field, New and Selected Poems. Her latest book, That Other Life, was published by Carnegie Mellon Press in 2023), and in 2024 Red Dragonfly Press will publish Home Words, to complete a trilogy centered around the changing rural landscape in Minnesota. She is one of the co-editors (along with Connie Wanek and Thom Tammaro) of To Sing Along the Way, an anthology of Minnesota women poets (New Rivers Press, 2006), and her poems have been widely published in anthologies and journals such as The Great River Review, Water~stone, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Great River Review, and online at The Poetry Foundation, The Writer's Almanac, and Poetry Daily. Her poems have been choreographed, animated, performed, filmed, and set to music by such composers as Libby Larson and Lori Laitman, and Ryan Homsey. Awards for her work include a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, two Jerome fellowships, a Salzburg Fellowship, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry and residencies at Norcroft, Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, and the Anderson Center. She teaches literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Other poems by Joyce Sutphen in Verse Daily:
October 8, 2022:   "First Snow" "I was at my desk, thinking..."

Other poems on the web by Joyce Sutphen:
"The First Child"
"The Lost Day"
"How to Listen"
Forty poems
Five poems
"From Out the Cave"
"Crossroads"
Five poems
"Agape House"

Joyce Sutphen's Website.

About That Other Life:

"In Joyce Sutphen's latest, brilliant collection, she spins poems out of memory, dreams and longing into a book that dances and skips through time and space like a hummingbird. That Other Life is filled with homes remembered or dreamt of, pasts lived and not lived, possible futures, shimmering throughout with music, art, and references to beloved poets past and present. How lucky we are that Sutphen chose not other lives but her singular poet's life, one in which she—with her trademark gorgeous specificity—traces the arc of a life lived in love with life itself."
—Alison McGhee

"Through the many lives lived and imagined in That Other Life, Joyce Sutphen gives us a work to savor for a lifetime, a book to return to and share. Line by line she invites us to cross a new threshold, to stand 'in the doorway, listening, / as on an island in an old country—.' Every poem in this remarkably beautiful volume bears the mark of authenticity: integrity of voice and originality of vision, emotional power and subtle artistry, an equal commitment to clarity and mystery, language called forth by elemental experience and reflections that keep inflecting. Sutphen is a poet whose syntax can be as mercurial as the behavior of light on a leaf: 'What I did not know I did not have is / what I was looking for even when I // did not know what it was I did not have.' Radically open to vulnerability, to not knowing as much as knowing, she maintains faith in the world, blessing 'the one that surrounds us, / the one that causes such suffering / and refuses to let us go.'"
—Phillis Levin

"'I've built us a little nest,' Sutphen writes, 'here we will remain, and silence be the rest.' That Other Life is a nest of brilliant poems from a long creative life feathered with mothers-in-law, boyfriends, writers, wars, and losses. Sutphen is a great artist in her prime. Sonnets presented as couplets, her couplings hatch with the joys and challenges of love. Kindness is the tune from her nest. Kindness differs from nice; kindness endures and kindness takes work. Of kindness the world cannot have enough: what solace to have these wing-born lyrics—a book of hope."
—Spencer Reece