Susan Windle

Susan Windle(1952-)is a Philadelphia poet, performer, teaching artist and explorer of the mystical path. She is the founder of Voices of a Different Dream, a trio of women who blend words spoken and sung in lush and inventive ways. In addition to her newest publication, Through the Gates:A Practice for Counting the Omer, Susan is author of two volumes of poetry, Love Letters and Between the Doors, and co-author of Already Near You: Poetry in Concert with poet and ensemble member Ellen Ford Mason. In addition to her work with Voices of a Different Dream, she has collaborated with composer Andrea Clearfield and with well known Philadelphia jazz musicians Warren Oree and Sherry Wilson Butler. Her love of collaboration extends also to the visual arts. With artists Sara Steele and Alana Lea, Susan created a series of “poem-prints,” fine art prints in which visual image and written word entwine and converse. Throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and beyond, she offers her poetry as liturgy and inspiration for progressive religious groups, Jewish, Muslim, Unitarian Universalist, Christian and inter-spiritual groups, as well as for rallies, fundraisers and other gatherings for social justice.

Susan defines her mission this way: “I create spaces and ways for people to be deeply alone and deeply together. I am interested in the resonances between us, the places where our loneliness dissolves and we hear and see, unique as we are, ourselves in one another, knowing ourselves to be part of one vibrating creation. I live to see and experience what can be created when we explore the loamy richness of this knowledge. Nothing compels me more than the sense that we are moving daily, with faith and persistence, into what poet Denise Levertov calls, ‘a communion of solitudes’. I believe that enormous political power for good can grow when we come together and meet one another, feet planted firmly on the earth, in the shimmering truth of our beings.”