Susann Cokal

Susann Cokal is an American author. She is best known for having written the novels The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mirabilis, Mermaid Moon, and Breath and Bones, along with short stories, literary and pop-culture criticism, and book reviews. The Kingdom of Little Wounds won a Printz silver medal from the American Library Association in 2014.

Cokal has contributed short stories to anthologies and journals including The Saturday Evening Post, Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Ohio State University's The Journal. She also contributed essays about contemporary writers to Critique, Scandinavian Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Style, Broad Street Magazine, and The Centennial Review. She has reviewed almost four dozen books for the New York Times Book Review and has contributed reviews and essays to numerous other reviewing organs.

Cokal was formerly an assistant professor of creative writing and modern literature at California Polytechnic State University and an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She retired from academia after a traumatic brain injury (TBI).^[1] The range of her interests can be seen in her contributions to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture on abortion, supermodels, Kate Moss, and zoos. She teaches literature of the last 150 years with an international perspective, often featuring Vladimir Nabokov (whom she has called one of her literary idols), Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Knut Hamsun, Marcel Proust, Patrick Süskind, Sarah Waters, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, and magic-realist authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, Gina Nahai, and Winterson.