Susan Barba is a poet, translator, and senior editor at New York Review Books. She is the author of Fair Sun (2017), which was awarded the Anahid Literary Prize from Columbia University and the Minas & Kohar Tölölyan Prize, and geode (2020), a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is a co-editor of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (2005), and the editor of A Literary Field Guide to American Wildflowers (2022), which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award.
She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University; her dissertation, Poets of the Crossroads, focused on the poetry and politics of three poets in the 1930s: Eghishe Charents, Osip Mandelstam, and W.H. Auden. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and her translations from Armenian have appeared in Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, and Ararat. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, and her poems have been translated into Armenian, German, Romanian, and Swedish. She is an advisory board member of Brandeis University Press and the American University of Armenia Press, and a member-at-large on the Board of Directors of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.