POET LAUREATE OF EL DORADO COUNTY 2018 - 2020
El Dorado Arts Council inaugurated a Poet Laureate program for El Dorado County in 2016. This post, officially appointed by a conferring institution, is bestowed on a noted poet to honor his or her body of work, and to celebrate poetry as an art form.
South Lake Tahoe poet, travel writer, and educator Suzanne Roberts was chosen by a panel of literary experts for the breadth of her work, her engagement with the poetry community, and praise her work has received.
Suzanne's role of the Poet Laureate of El Dorado County entailed a two-year term beginning July 1, 2018, and ending June 30, 2020. Her term included the composition of several “occasional poems” per year which were presented or read at public events, creation and implementation of her own special Poetry Project as a public benefit, participation in public readings at libraries in all five El Dorado County supervisorial districts with the Laureate Trail, and participation in El Dorado County’s Poetry Out Loud program for high school students.
Suzanne Roberts is the author of the award-winning memoir, Almost Somewhere (Bison Books, 2012), as well as four collections of poetry, most recently, Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel.
She was named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler magazine, and her work has been published in many literary journals and magazines, including Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, River Teeth, Litro, and Zyzzyva. Suzanne holds a doctorate in Literature and the Environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and for the low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing at SNC-Tahoe. She lives in South Lake Tahoe.