Susan O'Dell Underwood directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee. Besides two chapbooks (From and Love and Other Hungers) her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, North Carolina Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a PhD in English from Florida State University. The first chapter of her novel Genesis Road won the Tennessee Arts Commission Grant for Literature. She and her husband, artist David Underwood, run Sapling Grove Press, devoted to underserved writers, artists, and photographers in Appalachia.

Books by Susan O'Dell Underwood:

Other poems on the web by Susan O'Dell Underwood:
Three poems
"Theodicy"
"God as Edmund Pettus Bridge"
Three poems
"Guilt"
"Tick"
"Specter"

Susan O'Dell Underwood's Website.

About The Book of Awe:

"Susan O'Dell Underwood is uniquely aware as a thinker and writer, and that awareness results in startling, vital poetry. The words of Leonard Cohen, sung to fame by Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Saint-Marie, might best describe this book's heartbeat: 'God is alive; Magic is afoot.' With lines spiritual at a cellular level, The Book of Awe praises truth and mystery again and again. Every poem in this collection will shake the reader to wakefulness."
—C. Ann Kodra

"The Book of Awe is the book that we need right now. Like the 'gorgeous faith of roots against the sand's erosion,' Underwood celebrates God's immanence in the world despite natural disaster and human error. While Underwood's topics—hubris, spite, gratitude, love—are ambitious, she centers her poems in the tangible miracles of canyons, fields, and lightning bugs. In the lovely image of a 'little doe' who symbolizes grace, Underwood gives the reader hope that no matter the pain, resurrection remains possible. These luscious, lyrical poems remind us that words keep us alive."
—Anya Krugovoy Silver

"Susan O'Dell Underwood's The Book of Awe is a bracing, brave, bittersweet report of what the poet has heard with her ear 'pressed to the planet's pulse' and to 'the craving soil… rapt with quivering.' In poems that ponder sequoia trees, oil spills, rag dolls, and jellyfish, Underwood finds the world wonder-filled, instructive, and God-haunted. Underwood shows us that the things of the world—a kettle of water, coveralls, snakeskins, rock formations—the things we observe and listen to and bide with can astonish us, can become ways for us to 'know sometime, somewhere the wild inevitable beauty.'"
—William Woolfitt